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FOUR YEARS' EXPERIENCE 



CATHOLIC RELIGION: 



OBSERVATIONS ON ITS EFFECTS UPON THE CHARACTER, 
INTELLECTUAL, MORAL, AND SPIRITUAL. 



BY J. M. CAPES, ESQ. 




S PHILADELPHIA: 
PRINTED BY T. K. AND P. a. COLLINS. 

1849. 



<&«* 

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PREFACE 



Mr. Capes, the author of the following pages, was formerly a dis- 
tinguished member of the Oxford University, and a divine of the Pro- 
testant Episcopal Church. In 1845, he was received into the Catholic 
Church, and, since that time, he has had ample opportunity to view 
her in all her phases, and the little work before us shows, that he has 
turned this opportunity to good account. He has, in a condensed form, 
brought under review T the principal doctrines of the Church, and shown 
their adaptation to the wants of man. The clear and logical manner, in 
which he treats his subject, proves, that he is well versed in theological 
controversy, while the honest and open earnestness, which is apparent 
upon every page, will convince all of his unaffected integrity and cheer- 
ful piety. 

All, who will give these pages an attentive perusal, will be amply 
repaid ; and the sentiments contained in them will command great 
weight, when the character, talents and experience of their author shall 
be taken into consideration. The testimony of one such man alone 
should, of itself, be sufficient to break up the monstrous deep-rooted 
prejudices, which exist against the Catholic Church. 

The expense of this little publication has been mainly defrayed by 
the self-prompted contributions of two or three charitable gentlemen. 
The proceeds from the sale of it will, therefore, be appropriated to one 
of the charitable institutions of the city. 

E. Q. S. Waldron. 

Philadelphia, December 7, 1849. 



FOUR YEAES' EXPERIENCE 



CATHOLIC RELIGION 



OBSERVATIONS ON ITS EFFECTS UPON THE CHARACTER, INTELLECTUAL, 
MORAL, AND SPIRITUAL. 

BY A LATE MEMBER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 



It is not too much to suppose, that there is a large class of persons 
in this country who feel a deep interest in the present mental condition 
of those numerous converts who, during the last few years, have sub- 
mitted themselves to the faith of the Catholic Church. There are, 
perhaps, thousands who would rejoice to be able to see into the minds 
of those, who know the Catholic Church by personal experience of its 
influence upon themselves. It cannot be doubted, that the Church of 
Rome presents to those, who are without her pale, an aspect, which is 
partly terrifying, partly confounding, and partly mysterious, even in 
those instances, where it is admitted, that she undoubtedly is a portion 
of the true Church of Christ, and even may after all be that spiritual 
home, for which so many anxious souls are eagerly yearning. From 
the ferocious anti-Popish zealot, up to the ultra-Puseyite, or the ob- 
server of extreme candor, all agree in regarding her with a species of 
painful curiosity, as something awful, strange, incomprehensible, and 
self-contradictory; as uniting the noblest with the vilest qualities ; as 
producing, apparently by the same means, heroes, villains, knaves, and 
dupes ; as a strange compound, in short, of evangelical purity and 
worldly craft, of apostolic zeal and grasping ambition, of inspired 
truth and debasing delusion. Whether, therefore, as a mere psycholo- 
gical phenomenon, or as a branch, though corrupted, of the true Church 
of Christ, or as a body, which has attracted to itself some of the most 
learned, able, and self-denying of English Protestants, the Catholic 
1 



Church is, at the present hour, an object of deep interest to vast num- 
bers of the best of our countrymen, and they long to comprehend the 
precise nature of the power she exercises over the minds which are 
subjected to her sway. I propose, then, as one who has thus made 
personal trial of her powers for some considerable period of time, to 
communicate the results of my experience to those, who are interested 
in knowing what it is really to be a Catholic. 

In so doing, I must request pardon for the apparent egotism of the 
following pages. The very nature of the case will compel me to speak 
of myself in a manner, and with a frequency, which, unless absolutely 
necessary, would be absolutely intolerable. The statement I am about 
to make is so eminently a personal statement, and so essentially con- 
nected with the individual, who puts it forward, that it will be impossi- 
ble to avoid a repeated reference to myself and my ideas, opinions, and 
feelings, for which some little apology may perhaps seem due. 

The first question that will naturally be asked of a person who pro- 
fesses to give a true picture of the influence of the Catholic religion, 
and of its features at the present time, refers to his own competency as 
a witness. " What are you?" it will very justly be said ; " what op- 
portunities have you had for forming a correct judgment? what are 
your personal qualifications for so delicate an office ? what were you 
before you entered your new state, and what means did you then pos- 
sess to enable you to institute a correct comparison between the in- 
fluences and facts of Catholicism and Protestantism?" 

In all these points I believe that I may legitimately claim to be heard 
as a competent witness. Since I entered the Catholic Church, circum- 
stances have made me acquainted with a very large number of English 
Catholics, of various ranks and different ecclesiastical positions. I 
have known personally, with various degrees of intimacy, seven or 
eight Bishops, several presidents of colleges and superiors of religious 
houses, a large number of the clergy, both secular and regular, in dif- 
ferent parts of England, and of the laity, of different professions, occu- 
pations, and rank, with a considerable proportion of those converts 
who, during the last five or six years, have left the ranks of Anglican- 
ism and submitted themselves to the Catholic Church. With many of 
all these I am on terms of intimate friendship, while chance and the 
course of events have put me into positions for seeing an unusual num- 
ber of eminent and influential personages, in circumstances of trying 
character, and such as reveal not only a man's strength, but his weak- 
ness, and test both himself and his religious faith and principles to the 
very foundation. 



3 

Before I was a Catholic, I had also as many opportunities of exa- 
mining into the true character and genius of Protestantism, as fall to 
the lot of most men; indeed, few Protestants have had such ample 
means for forming an unbiassed judgment as those which fell to my 
lot. From the time of my boyhood, until I submitted to the Church 
of Rome, I had met with, and, in many instances, had entered into close 
bonds of friendship and affection with men of almost every class of 
opinion, which is to be found in the Church of England, having also 
been acquainted with individual Dissenters, who were very trustworthy 
examples of the dissenting schools. I numbered among my near friends 
and relatives old-fashioned High Churchmen, cautious Tractarians, 
zealous Puseyites, unhesitating Romanisers, conscientious Latitudina- 
rians, with Evangelicals, old and young, of every shade of Church- 
manship ; and persons of the untheoretical, amiable, do-their-duty 
Church of England school, who go on their way as their fathers taught 
them, and live and die seeking only peace and quietness, and sober yet 
sincere practical religion. From an early age, also, I had been accus- 
tomed to notice and reflect upon the various characters and principles 
of every one with whom I associated, to form opinions upon their 
conduct, and investigate the connection between their religious views 
and their actual life and state of mind. 

Nor could it be reasonably alleged against what I have to say, that 
I entered the Church of Rome under the influence of those ardent 
feelings and determined prepossessions, which might, perhaps, warp 
my judgment of the facts, which I really encountered, and render the 
history of my experience, a history of my personal emotions and fancies, 
rather than a detail of unvarnished realities. So far was I from sub- 
mitting to the Church under the power of an unreasoning enthusiasm, 
that it was in most respects, with the greatest reluctance, that I took 
the step. It was simply on a clear, well-argued conviction, that it was 
absolutely necessary to my salvation, that I broke through every bar- 
rier which kept me ba<jk. I had none of that yearning for the advan- 
tages of confession, that feeling of utter intellectual helplessness, or 
that dependence upon the example and opinions of others, which in 
some cases, predispose the mind to seek for rest in the bosom of 
Catholicism. Long before I had the faintest idea of ever actually be- 
coming a Catholic, I had reasoned myself into a belief, that all the 
doctrines of Rome were true, and that the Scripture, to those who will 
really examine it, and who believe in its inspiration, is an incompre- 
hensible book, except on the supposition that the decrees of the Coun- 
cil of Trent are to be received as infallible. Absurd as it may seem, 



and absurd as it certainly was, I was convinced that the Church of 
England was, in no sense of the word, a portion of the Church of Christ, 
long before I even thought of leaving her. I accounted my own an 
exceptional case, and rested on the belief, that I could be saved, though 
I was out of the visible Church, and though I knew, that I was out of 
it. Monstrous indeed was the belief, but still it was my belief; and it 
proves, that though at length the conviction of the hollowness of my 
theory came upon me with an irresistible force, which would brook no 
longer delay, yet I was, in fact, as well acquainted with everything that 
could be said on both sides of the question, as if I had been four or 
five years considering whether I should myself personally obey the 
call of the Catholic Church to enter her fold. In truth, I was far bet- 
ter acquainted with the real bearings of the controversy, than if I had 
weighed them under the influence of high-wrought excitement, and of 
that intense anxiety, which presses upon the mind the moment the 
idea of becoming a Catholic, takes a practical hold upon it. It was 
with all the coolness of a mere speculative reasoner, that I examined 
into the truth of every single separate doctrine of the Roman Church, 
and into the tenableness of every ecclesiastical position, which could 
possibly be taken up against her. Profoundly interesting as was the 
subject, I had become as clearly convinced, on undeniable grounds, that 
belief in any religious doctrine whatsoever is logically impossible, 
without the existence of a living infallible guide, and that a visible 
Church, without such a head as the Pope is, is a contradiction in terms, 
as that the earth is round, and that the moon shines by reflected light 
from the sun. I saw that, if Christianity is from God, Protestantism 
in every possible form is an intellectual absurdity, and a violation of the 
elementary laws of reasoning and common sense. 

Lastly, since I have been a Catholic, I have repeatedly recurred both 
to the arguments, which, in my judgment, establish the truth of Catho- 
licism, and also to the reasonings by which religious belief, in its very 
essence, is recommended to the mind. Again and again, sometimes 
on various practical occasions more immediately bearing upon my own 
conviction, sometimes in the way of controversy with Protestantism, 
or infidelity in their various modifications, sometimes in the way of 
calm meditation and reflection, I have gone over everything, that can 
be said on the general question involved, and on all the details of faith 
and practice which are found in the Catholic Church. I have en- 
deavored honestly and courageously to look every difficulty in the 
face, to do justice to the facts of history, to avoid all undue palliation 
of the errors or sins of individual Catholics, and to separate my own 



private notions and likings from those objective truths, which exist apart 
from my individual experience. 

How far I may be personally fitted to bear trustworthy testimony 
on the subject, is a question on which I can offer no opinion. No man 
is a competent judge of his own merits or demerits, or a dispassionate 
observer of the features of his own character. Still, if I might ven- 
ture upon any such statement, I should be disposed to say, that I am 
not naturally disposed to unreasoning credulity, to superstitious vene- 
ration, or to an undue dependence upon the authority of great names, 
or upon the views of those with whom I may associate. My errors 
would be rather on the side of a too great independence of judgment, 
of excessive dislike of assertions unsupported by clear proofs, and of 
general incredulity in everything that appears marvellous or supernatu- 
ral. But however this may be, I may fairly lay claim to those average 
powers of observation and criticism, that mens sana in corpore sano, 
which would entitle any person to be received as a competent witness 
in a court of justice, and commend his evidence to the respect, if not 
to the acquiescence, of every fair and candid mind. As to sincerity 
of intention and truthfulness of statement in what I have to say, of 
course, like other men, I believe myself upright and honorable. No 
man, who invites the attention of the public on such a subject, professes 
himself otherwise than sincere and religious, and few think themselves 
not to be really so. I can only say, that I trust I have been, and still 
am, guided by a single-minded desire, both to learn what is strictly true 
and good in the sight of Almighty God, and to practice no imposition 
whatsoever, upon the belief of others. Without further preface, then, 
I proceed to lay before the world the results of four years' experience 
of the Catholic religion. 

The first question that would be asked of persons who have become 
Catholics, by those who are unconnected with any religious party in 
the country, would probably be directed to ascertain the effects of 
Catholicism upon the practical freedom of the intelligence. Various 
as are the views which English Protestants take of the creed of Rome, 
they all agree in looking upon it as a despotic sovereign, which holds 
the intellect and judgment of those, who submit to its dictates, in an 
iron grasp, and rigorously forbids that unbiassed liberty of following 
after truth at all costs, which is the inalienable privilege and the 
bounden duty of every creature endowed with the great gift of reason. 
There can be little doubt, that a man who has entered the Catholic 
Church is popularly believed to have parted with all rights to think 



for himself, or to escape from a benumbing, destroying thraldom of the 
faculties, except by bursting the bonds, in which he has unwittingly 
involved himself, and casting off the yoke of Rome in indignation. 
His friends pity him, his kindred weep for him, the man of shrewd 
sense laughs at him, and the vulgar crowd stares at him as a sort of 
wild beast. Whatever be the degree of moral enormity, which is at- 
tributed to a convert, all agree in thinking him more or less a fool. 
He is regarded with much the same mingled wonder and sorrow with 
which we listen to the ravings of insanity, and see a poor creature in 
a lunatic asylum disbelieving the evidence of his senses, and imagining 
his wretched cell to be a royal palace. We are supposed to have fallen 
into a sort of second childhood, in which we voluntarily surrender our 
powers of reasoning, observing, and reflecting, and acquiesce in state- 
ments as absurd to the free intelligence of men of sense, as the notion 
that two and two make five, or that the whole is not greater than a 
part of it. Have I, then, found Catholicism an intellectual bondage 
to myself, and have I remarked a similar slavery in the case of others? 

If I may state the truth, without fear of being counted guilty of 
ridiculous exaggeration, I should reply, that no man knows what per- 
fect intellectual freedom is, until he becomes a member of the Church 
of Rome. I have passed my whole life in as bold and unhesitating 
an exercise of the privileges of thought as is ventured upon by most 
persons ; but most conscientiously can I allege, that my previous inde- 
pendence in reasoning was like a toiling in fetters, compared with the 
unbounded liberty of which I have been conscious, ever since I ceased 
to be a Protestant. I am unconscious of what intellectual fear is, ex- 
cept the fear of being wrong, and the fear that passion, pride, self-in- 
dulgence, prejudice or ignorance, should warp my judgment, delude me 
into miscalculating probabilities, tempt me into mistaking my own 
wishes for logical proofs, or blind me to the real laws of reasoning, 
which control all human knowledge whatsoever. 

It is commonly supposed, indeed, that a man of sense and intellec- 
tual courage cannot believe the dogmas of Catholicism without vio- 
lating the first principles of reasoning, and enslaving his judgment at 
the beck of a designing priesthood. So far from this being the case, 
I find myself compelled to act in the very opposite direction. I can- 
not help believing the truth of Catholicism in general, nor can I per- 
ceive the slightest violation of the laws of reasoning in any one of its 
separate doctrines. Granting the truth of Christianity as a divine 
revelation, my reason forces me to be convinced that no one form of 
Protestantism can possibly be true. So far as argument is concerned, 



I can see and feel the difficulties, which exist in the way of the recep- 
tion of the Christian religion as divine, and even of belief in any reli- 
gion whatsoever, natural or revealed ; but when once the question of 
the origin of Christianity is settled, though I can see and feel argu- 
ments against the Church of Rome, and admit that, so far as they go, 
they are difficulties which must be solved, yet I can see nothing in 
favor of any doctrinal Protestantism whatsoever ; and I can no more 
avoid believing in the exclusive claims of the Church of Rome, than I 
can help believing in the deductions of physical astronomy or of elec- 
tricity. The argument in favor of Rome is precisely similar to the 
reasonings, which establish the great facts of any purely human science, 
which is based upon probabilities, and not on mathematical certainties. 
On such morally proved sciences, whether physical, domestic, social, 
or political, the whole course of our daily existence is conducted. We 
neither eat, drink, move, talk, read, buy, sell, grieve, rejoice or, in a 
word, act for a moment as reasonable creatures, except on the suppo- 
sition that certain general ideas are true, and must be «acted upon, 
although not one of them can be proved with all the strictness of a 
mathematical proposition. Yet no man in his senses calls this an in- 
tellectual bondage, or wonders that people can devote their whole lives 
to a course of conduct against which some difficulties can be alleged, 
though the balance of probabilities is decidedly in its favor. 

And just such is my experience of the effect of a belief in the infal- 
libility of the Catholic Church on my daily, moral and spiritual exist- 
ence. I grant that there are some difficulties to be urged against 
Christianity, and that the proof of the infallibility of Rome is not a 
mathematical proof; but nevertheless,! cannot help perceiving, that the 
balance of proof is undeniably in favor of Christianity and of the 
Catholic Church, and therefore I cannot help acting myself in accord- 
ance with that balance, and no more believe or feel that I am intellect- 
ually a slave, than when I believe that I am at this moment awake, though 
it is impossible to prove that I am not asleep and dreaming. Many 
people imagine that a Catholic lives and moves with a sort of sense of 
intellectual discomfort, with a half-admitted consciousness that he is 
the victim of a delusion ; that he dreads the light of criticism and ar- 
gument, and is afraid of having his opinions honestly and rigorously 
canvassed. For my own part, 1 can most solemnly assert, that, from 
the moment I entered the Catholic Church, I felt like a man, who has 
just shattered the fetters, which have impeded his movements from his 
childhood. I experienced a sensation of intellectual relief, to which I 
believe every conscientious Protestant to be an utter stranger. So far 



8 

from feeling as if I had renounced the great privileges of humanity, 
and subjugated myself to a debasing servitude, I was conscious that 
now, for the first time, my faculties had fair play, that I was no longer 
in bondage to shams, forms of speech, pious frauds, exploded fables, 
youthful prejudices or the impudent fabrications of baseless authority. 
Reason, like a young eagle for the first time floating forth from its 
mountain nest, and trusting itself with no faltering wing to the bound- 
less expanse of ether around, above and below, rejoiced in her new- 
found powers, and looked abroad upon the mighty universe of material 
and immaterial being, with that unflinching gaze with which the soul 
dares to look, when conscious that the God, who made her, has, at 
length, set her free. To tell me, at such a time, that I was enslaving 
my reason by that very act which enabled her to assert her supre- 
macy, or that I was violating truth and common sense, by embracing 
the most probable of two momentous alternatives, I should have counted 
a folly not worthy to be refuted. And such have I felt it to this day. 
I am conscious that I have embraced one vast, harmonious system, 
which alone, of all the religions of mankind, is precisely what it pre- 
tends to be, and nothing less and nothing more. I behold before me 
a mighty body of doctrine and practice, self-consistent in all its parts, 
cohering by rigid logical deductions, and held together by certain 
moral laws, which are as universally applied in every conceivable con- 
tingency, as is the physical law of gravity throughout the visible uni- 
verse. Complicated and varied as it is, and diverse in nature as are 
the many elements which go to make up its far-stretching whole, I can 
detect no flaw in the structure, no incompatibility of one feature with 
another, no tendency to decay, no token of failure in accomplishing all 
that it really professes to accomplish. I find everything to charm and 
invigorate my intellect. If I am enthralled, it is in a bondage to truth; 
if I am fascinated, it is by the spell of faultless beauty. 

It is the same, too, when I go on to view the separate doctrines, 
which the Church of Rome teaches, one by one. I hear and read of 
persons saying that these dogmas, or some of them, are absurd, or im- 
possible, or self-contradictory, or immoral; but no where in the whole 
range of Roman doctrine, can I discern for myself any single state- 
ment which is opposed either to reason or morality. All, that I marvel 
at, is the dense ignorance which possesses those who bring the accusa- 
tion, and the astonishing stupidity, which has enthralled mankind with 
respect to the very doctrines, which they profess to disprove, and which 
they vehemently denounce. Profound as is my conviction of the 
wickedness of man, still deeper is the conviction of his intense folly 



which the sight of the course of theological controversy induces. I 
hear myself charged with holding doctrines, which were never heard 
of in the Catholic Church; I see her accused for not accomplishing 
results, which she never pretends to accomplish, and which were never 
attempted by any religious body upon earth; I behold her charged 
with crimes and absurdities which, by no possibility, can exist together 
within her ; while, within her magic circle alone, reason acts reasonably, 
ascertains her own powers, makes use of them to the fullest possible 
extent to which they can reach, and then pauses in conformity with 
her own irrefragable decisions. 

I cannot help being aware that those who formerly knew me, and 
others who, like myself, have entered the Catholic Church, are amazed 
that we should have been able to bring ourselves to accept what they 
regard as the most monstrous of absurdities, if not the most scandalous 
of enormities. Yet the only absurdity, that I can perceive, lies in the 
charge they bring, and in the enormity of that uncharitableness which 
condemns a man unheard. For instance, it is supposed that in the 
doctrine of transubstantiation, we run counter to the evidence of our 
senses, and believe that to be true which our sight, touch, and taste 
tell us is not true. Yet in the whole range of false accusations, which 
history records, nowhere is there to be found a more gratuitous and 
disgraceful slander, or an assertion which more strikingly displays the 
ignorance of those who make it. The doctrine of the Catholic Church 
with respect to the change in the Eucharistic Elements is, that nothing 
belonging to the bread and wine of which the senses take cognizance 
is changed ; and that what is changed, is that with which the senses 
have no more to do than they have to do with the inhabitants of the 
antipodes. We are all agreed (except a few book-worms) that in every 
material object, besides its color, its form, its taste, its smell, and so 
forth, there exists a certain something, of which color, form, taste, and 
the like, are what is popularly called the qualities, or, in metaphysical 
language, the accidents. Now, it is manifest to every person, who 
knows the meaning of words, that our senses of smelling, tasting, 
touching, &c, inform us of the nature of these qualities or accidents, 
and that they do nothing more. We see that a thing is black, white, 
or blue ; we feel it to be rough or smooth, cold or hot; and so with 
the rest; but as to that mysterious something, that "substance," as it 
is termed in metaphysics, which lies at the bottom of these qualities, 
and to which they are all attached, our senses tell us nothing whatever 
about it. For aught that our senses can judge, the substance of bread 
is the same as the substance of flesh, or the substance of lightning is 



10 

the same as the substance of a piece of wood. Whether the substance 
in all the elements of the universe is essentially alike, or whether there 
are as many myriads of variations in substance as there are in outward 
appearances, our senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and seeing, leave 
us hopelessly in the dark. 

When, then, I, who believe, that, in the Eucharistic Elements, this 
substance is changed — no matter on what grounds I believe it — am 
charged with asserting that, which contradicts the evidence of the senses, 
I simply smile at my accuser's foolishness. I see that he might as 
reasonably pretend that it contradicts the evidence of the senses to be- 
lieve that there is a God, because the Divinity cannot be touched, tasted, 
smelt, heard, or seen. I ask him if he ever saw his own soul ; and 
why, if I may not believe more than my senses tell me, respecting the 
presence of Jesus Christ in the consecrated species, he is justified in 
believing more than his senses tell him with respect to himself. So 
far from finding myself more in a state of bondage as a Catholic than 
I was as a Protestant, even in respect of this great doctrine, which is 
regarded as the crowning point of Catholic folly and imposture, I see 
that nearly all men and women, of every rank and grade, who attack 
the dogma of transubstantiation, are so extravagantly absurd as to con- 
ceive they overthrow its claims by assertions which have nothing on 
earth to do with the question really under discussion. 

Such also have I found to be the result upon myself in all other 
separate Catholic doctrines. One and all commend themselves to the 
reasoning faculty, with a clearness and force, which I truly believe to 
exceed the clearness and force that are possessed by any branch of 
purely human knowledge, excepting always the deductions of pure 
mathematics. In almost every case I find them different from what they 
are popularly supposed to be ; and the longer I continue to be a Catholic, 
the more extraordinary appears the contrast between that which the 
Church really believes and teaches, and that which the world imputes 
to her. The more I reflect upon it, the more mysterious is the phe- 
nomenon she presents, as the most misunderstood, the most misrepre- 
sented, the most maligned institution, which ever existed in the whole 
history of mankind. So far from feeling that my judgment is clouded, 
or that my faculties are prevented from having their full play, I per- 
ceive more and more clearly that the Catholic Church is the only body 
in which man's reason has tolerable liberty to follow out its conclusions 
with consistency, unbiassed by association, unwarped by prejudice, 
and unenslaved by passion. Admitting to the fullest extent the sins 
of many Catholics in all ages, their errors, their ignorance, their blind- 



11 

ness, and their superstition, still I cannot possibly help seeing that in 
comparison with the intellectual servitude which holds the world with- 
out in bonds, we are faultless, enlightened, acute, and profound to the 
utmost limits of which humanity is capable. 

On the other hand, how far the course of modern civilization is im- 
peded by the reception of Catholicism, is a question which is, by no 
means, easy of solution. From all that I can judge by experience of 
its effects on myself and on others, I should be disposed to say, that, while 
it tends to the culture of the intelligence, and to the development of all 
the faculties of the mind to the highest possible extent, it would lead 
its disciples to march, with a somewhat hesitating step, in what is 
commonly termed the civilization of the age. How far it would dis- 
courage purely intellectual cultivation apart from religion, is a question, 
with which I have nothing to do, as I am speaking only of what are 
the effects of a sincere belief of Catholic doctrines, and an earnest 
practice of Catholic duties, upon the thoughts and life of man. While, 
then, I see every token that there is not a faculty in the soul, whether 
it be the pure reasoning faculty, the imagination, the taste, the love of 
extensive and accurate knowledge, or that which we term common 
sense, which Catholicism does not tend directly to stimulate in the 
healthiest and most effective possible manner; — while I see that its 
sons may be impelled by a burning enthusiasm to triumph throughout 
the whole domain of human studies, and to bend every acquisition of 
mental power to the service of God and the salvation of souls ; — while 
the Catholic will labor with unwearying energies, and with the highest 
abilities, in the fields of mathematics, history, philosophy, science, 
poetry, or fiction, just as in former days the whole course of European 
civilization was directed and impelled by the devoted sons of the 
Church ; at the same time it is impossible to overlook the fact, that so 
far as our civilization depends upon the pursuit of gain, and the restless 
strivings of ambition, so far it would suffer in the hands of devout 
Catholics. There exists in the Catholic faith a power to detach the 
affections from everything on this side of the grave, which neces- 
sarily makes men take matters somewhat too easily to be in harmony 
with the notions of the present epoch. A pious Catholic, to a certain 
extent, sees no future, except that which commences after death. He 
lives for the present hour and for eternity. He has a greater tendency 
to take the affairs of life as they come, and to enjoy what he actually 
has in possession, without putting himself very much out of the way 
to add to his store, than is usually found among ardent and business- 



12 

like Protestants. Taken on the whole, I do not believe that Catholic 
merchants, Catholic tradesmen, Catholic travelers, or Catholic bank- 
ers, will ever so successfully compete with men of the world of simi- 
lar occupations as to make as large fortunes as their Protestant compe- 
titors, or to exercise as powerful an influence upon the economic pro- 
gress of the age. We never shall, taken as a body, be the first in the 
nation as men of business ; and I question whether we could ever be 
first (though we might be second) in the study of those physical 
sciences with whose cultivation the characteristic movement of our time 
is so intimately bound up. It is undeniable, that Catholics do not care 
so much as others, for those objects which furrow the sober and labo- 
rious Englishman's brow, and bend him down with premature old age. 
Not only the general influence of their religion, as a spiritual system, 
but the nature of their belief in the excellence of poverty, and of the 
monastic and celibate life, and in the pernicious nature of excessive 
carefulness, and of a melancholy, anxious spirit, tends to make them 
sit down contented amid reverses, and comparatively careless about 
worldly success, where other men would strain every nerve to struggle 
against the assaults of fortune, and to "provide against every possible 
future contingency. 

That such a diminution in the energies of our day would cause 
a diminution in the amount of human happiness, I am, indeed, pre- 
pared totally to deny. I should regard a colder devotion to the busi- 
ness of life, as one of the greatest blessings which could be granted 
to our care-stricken country. Next to a reception of the true religion, 
I can conceive nothing so beneficial to the Anglo-Saxon race as an in- 
fusion of a spirit of light-hearted cheerfulness, and a less keen suscep- 
tibility to the peculiar charms of our modern civilization. Not only 
would such a change from our gloomy, toiling habits produce an in- 
stantaneous addition to the positive enjoyments of every hour in the 
day, but it would exert a controlling power over that awful movement 
towards universal pauperism, which is the great frightful fact of our 
times. Strange and paradoxical as it may seem, a comparative care- 
lessness about wealth is the only practicable cure for the evils of ex- 
cessive poverty. For some generations now past the whole course of 
the English social and economical system has been to multiply the 
productions of human labor with the least possible advantage to the 
producers. Though every human being brings into the world the same 
physical and mental powers of production as his forefathers of every 
past age, and though the marvellous instrumentality of machinery ena- 
bles him to employ those powers with tenfold^.twentyfold, or a hun- 



13 

dredfold more successful results, so that the entire population of the 
empire at this moment calls into existence far more in proportion of 
the necessities of life than did any past generation, yet such is the 
unhappy distribution of these increased products that every day fewer 
and fewer is the comparative number of those who are benefited by 
them, and harder and harder does it become for the great mass of the 
people to live. 

Now, political economy recognizes no counteracting power in 
human nature to check this excessive operation of the principles on 
which civilized life is carried on. It has no safety-valve to prevent a 
frightful explosion in the machinery of society. The very law on 
which the riches, the luxuries, the comforts, and the refinements of 
civilization are created, is the law of selfishness. These things could 
not exist without a distinction between rich and poor, without that 
command over the labor of others which wealth confers upon its pos- 
sessor. Were all men equal in property, according to the dreams of 
Socialism and Communism, the utmost that humanity could reach 
would be a step or two above the nakedness and houselessness of 
savage life. Art, refinement, literature, comforts, delicacies, of every 
conceivable description, would be, literally, impossibilities. Without 
the command, which the unequal distribution of wealth, enables the few 
to exercise over the many, we must sink at once into a state, resem- 
bling that of the settlers in a newly inhabited country, and be thankful 
if we could clothe our bodies and shelter them under a roof, and keep 
off actual starvation. Such, a state of things is, of course, wholly hypo- 
thetical ; for our inequalities in physical strength and in mental power 
would be sufficient to make some rich and powerful, and many poor 
and weak, in the course of four-and-twenty hours after the commence- 
ment of such a supposed universal equality. There are only three 
possible states in which man can exist: the paradisiacal state of inno- 
cence and bliss; the savage state, in which all things remain stationary; 
and the civilized state, in which all moves either in one uniform direc- 
tion forwards, or backwards towards barbarism. Civilized society can 
never check at its will the operation of the principle which is the source 
of its very existence. The law of nature, which makes one man rich 
and another poor, tends to make the first richer and the second poorer 
every day that passes by. The inevitable necessity, which first trans- 
ferred a portion of the natural property (so to call it) of the second to 
his more healthy, more powerful, or more skilful brother, goes on thus 
transferring fresh portions of the results of his labor to those, who are 
above him in command, until, as ages run on, gigantic wealth swells up 



14 

one extremity of the social scale, while the abyss of pauperism swallows 
all that are doomed to the other. The productions of civilized life are, 
in fact, the productions of a bargain between two parties, which is al- 
ways more favorable to one party than to the other. Nothing but 
some violent change can stay the inevitable termination. Civilization 
cannot control itself, or hold back the motive power to which it owes 
its being. Hence the whole history of the human race is a record of 
the advances of 'civilization, and of its ultimate issue in a wretched 
state of enfeeblement, wealth, and pauperism, which has invited con- 
quest, revolution, or total decay and death. 

The fanatics of Socialism and Communism, alive to these terrible 
facts, would fain remedy them by the substitution of some other social 
system, based on a radical misconception of human nature, and of the 
essence of civil society ; but they can no more cure the deadly disease 
than they can restore paradisiacal innocence and health to man, or para- 
disiacal fruitfulness to the earth. Their schemes are more fatal than 
the mischief they would counteract. The power of religion alone can 
stay the speed of this mighty engine, whose ever-increasing velocity 
threatens to whelm us all in destruction. Nothing upon earth can save 
society which cannot control man's selfishness, and make him content 
to forego those powers over his fellow-creatures which circumstances, 
or his own talents, have placed in his hands. What the French call 
V exploitation de Vhomme par Vhomme defies the skill and energies of 
all merely human motives to stop its headlong course. Man will hire 
man to do his bidding, till the employer and the employed perish to- 
gether, unless a voice come down from heaven and proclaim that this 
life is naught, in accents which shall command the attention of the most 
worldly, and accompanied with a spiritual power which shall soften 
the most selfish and stony heart. Nothing less than a voluntary and 
continually practiced renunciation of some portion of their legal rights 
over the poor on the part of the rich, can save the former from pauper- 
ism, and the latter from a simultaneous prostration into the abyss they 
have dug with their own hands. 

Now, that Catholicism is the only religion which thus strikes at the 
heart of the excessive love of wealth, few candid observers will deny. 
It is indeed a common reproach against Catholic countries, that they do 
not foster that spirit of secular enterprise on which the existence of 
modern civilization depends. The shrewd, sensible, prosperous Eng- 
lishman despises Catholicism, because he thinks that its votaries, when 
they have their religious services, their churches, their priests, and their 
amusements, are content to remain in happy inactivity, careless about 



15 

the future of this earthly life, and shrugging their shoulders in amaze- 
ment at the untiring toils of the care-worn Briton. And exaggerated 
as is this popular notion of the effects of Catholicism, I am prepared 
not only to admit that there is some measure of truth in it, but to main- 
tain that in this very feature of its influence is to be found the only 
safeguard of modern Europe. It is the only engine which the states- 
man and lawgiver can command, in order to control those suicidal tend- 
encies of the social system, at which at present he stands aghast, 
hopeless, helpless, and trembling. It is the only moving power which 
can exercise an antagonistic influence upon that love of money, rank, 
and ease, which in its unrestrained operation is ultimately as great a 
curse to those who thrive upon its gifts, as to those who writhe under 
its torturing grasp. Politicians, political economists, and the skeptical 
worldly-minded Protestant member of Parliament, may smile in incre- 
dulous contempt, but the unprejudiced thinker may be assured that the 
Catholic religion alone can ensure to society that permanence in earthly 
peace and prosperity which of old was sought by the advocates of 
agrarian laws, confiscations of the property of the rich, and heavy tax- 
ation upon their incomes, and which in these days is the blessing at 
which the wild theories of Socialism and Communism aim with frantic 
passion. How it does this, I will now show in detail. 

In the first place, from my personal experience of Catholicism, and 
from what I have seen of its influence upon others, I find that, practi- 
cally, it does detach the affections of man from his earthly possessions 
far more effectually than any one form of Protestant Christianity. Of 
course I am comparing its results upon persons who are conscientious 
and zealous in acting upon their own principles. I am not contrasting 
the mental condition of a careless Catholic, who, though he lives a not 
immoral life, is yet cold or lukewarm in his religious ways, who just 
fulfils the letter of his obligation as a Catholic and nothing more, with 
a devoted, energetic Protestant, who is given to prayer, almsgiving, and 
works of mercy. I am taking two men or women, whether old or 
young, rich or poor, who are apparently (as men usually judge) equally 
sincere and zealous in acting fully up to the highest moral and devotional 
standard of their respective communions; and I have not a moment's 
hesitation in alleging, that what I may call the unworldliness of the 
Catholic is so different from the unworldliness of the Protestant, that 
the latter can scarcely comprehend what it is, both in its nature and in 
its effects. I do not say that Protestantism will not, sometimes, during 
periods of great temporary excitement, as, for instance, during the better 
season of the Puseyite movement, impel its followers to very remark- 



16 

able and almost heroic acts of pecuniary self-denial and munificence ; 
but I do say, that of that practical, habitual, and irresistible sense of the 
transitory nature of all worldly goods, which forbids the mind even to 
care much about possessing them, they have at the best a very faint 
conception; while there is not an age, not a year, not a day, in which 
there are not thousands and tens of thousands of Catholics, both lay 
and clerical, both in the cloister and in the world, to whom the loss of 
worldly possessions, and the self-sacrificing renunciation of them for 
the good of others, is comparatively an easy and trifling task, for no 
other reason than that the realities of the spiritual world are present to 
their consciences with a vividness and closeness of contact, which is 
unknown to the conscientious Protestant mind. 

So striking, indeed, is the influence of this keen perception of the 
realities of eternity, that the Catholic sometimes appears insensible and 
almost heartless to his Protestant friends and kindred. The tender- 
hearted, anxious-minded, or prudent Protestant is shocked at the seem- 
ing coolness and indifference with which the Catholic will often go 
through scenes, or carry out his principles into acts, which rend the 
souls of those, who are strangers to that mysterious perception of the 
invisible, which sustains him when other men sink prostrate or yield in 
helpless weakness to a cruel destiny. Two friends shall be knit to- 
gether in the bonds of the closest Christian friendship, and pass their 
days together, laboring with apostolic zeal for the welfare of souls, and 
sharing all each other's hopes, fears, joys and sorrows, with the open- 
ness of a most brotherly affection: in a week or a day, sudden death 
shall carry one of them to his rest, and leave the other to toil alone for 
many a long year; yet is the survivor's heart still calm and peaceful ; 
the tears, that nature sheds, are wiped away by the hand of faith ; he 
goes on with his solitary labors, and men see scarce an additional 
furrow upon his brow, and marvel at his strange composure ; and all 
because his eyes are opened to the invisible world, — because he has 
been ever accustomed to live with his dearest friend as men, who walk 
together on a brief journey; and now that he, whom he still loves so 
warmly, is gone from his sight, he feels but as a traveler when his com- 
panion has parted with him just before the termination of his journey, 
only to hasten forward by a speedier road, and in a few days to welcome 
him with the embrace of love, when he too, at length, enters the portals 
of his true and only home. 

Or a maiden in the first bloom of youth, when all seems bright and 
promising, and while she has every prospect of still gladdening the 
hearth of her parents for many a long year with her cheerful smile, and 



17 

tending them in sorrow or sickness with sweet filial affection, all at 
once announces to them, that she believes that God is calling her to the 
life of the cloister ; that either for the sake of ministering to the sick 
and the poor, or of passing her days in mortifications and prayers, she 
desires to leave them now in the season of their most cherished enjoy- 
ments, and to become in some sense a stranger to them until death. 
Yet so deep is their sense of the reality of eternal things, and of the 
vanity of this life, that when the first shock is past, and all have sought 
strength to bear the parting from Him, whose will they trust they are 
performing, the father and the mother consign their child to her future 
life with scarcely more pain or anguish, than many parents commit their 
daughters to the care and love of a husband, and sometimes with a joy 
and gratitude to Him who is calling her to Himself alone, of which no 
conception can be formed by those who know the practices and feelings 
of Catholicism only from without. 

And so it is in the point, to which I am more especially referring. 
Wheresoever the Catholic faith comes, with even an average amount 
of zeal and fervor, there will be found innumerable instances of a 
facility in renouncing wealth and station, which is unknown except 
within the pale of the Church. When men and women have no fa- 
mily ties, which make it a duty to them to preserve their property in 
their own hands, they will devote it all to the service of religion, whether 
for the poor, or for education, or for the maintenance of the clergy and 
ecclesiastical edifices, with a readiness, which can only be produced by 
that sense of the worthlessness of secular pleasures which their religion 
infuses into them. I claim no great merit for them in so doing; I am 
only saying that it is comparatively easy Sot them to do it. The power 
of their faith upon their minds is such, that the sacrifice actually zsless 
to them, than it would be to the conscientious Protestant. During the 
hours of darkness we trim our candle or lamp with anxious gentleness, 
lest it be suddenly extinguished, and leave us in cold obscurity; but 
when the first rays of the morning sun shoot across the heavens, we 
care no more for our artificial light, and the sooner it disappears the 
better. Just so it is with the devout Catholic mind. It is not really 
insensible to the blessings of light and warmth. It feels as keenly as 
the most susceptible of mortal men; but in the midst of the blaze of 
noon it cannot be troubled at the loss of a flickering taper, or feel chilled 
when a few sticks upon the hearth cease to throw out their genial heat. 

Still more powerfully do Catholic ideas on poverty and monasticism 
tend to counteract the selfishness, which, as it is one of the chief sources 
of civilization, so is it ultimately its relentless destroyer. As the special 
2 



18 

influences I have been describing make it easy to a pious Catholic to 
part with his wealth, so his principles on these other points make him 
esteem it a glorious privilege to be able to distribute his possessions 
among a large number of persons, and to descend himself from the 
ranks of the wealthy to the ranks of the poor. A lukewarm, ill-in- 
structed, or merely correct Catholic may in truth pay the same offen- 
sive homage to wealth and greatness which we see in the separatist 
world around us; and wherever this miserable subservience to the anti- 
Christian feelings of that world, which is the enemy of God, is thus 
found in the children of the Church of the poor, it is doubly detestable 
in the eyes of those who treat the world's maxims with the contempt 
they deserve : but a good Catholic aims at esteeming poverty and 
wealth in precisely the same light as his Lord and Master esteemed 
them; and as he counts it an honor to be despised for Christ's sake, 
and a joy to suffer for him, so he looks upon the renunciation of riches, 
when God calls him to it, as a gain, and not as a loss — as an increase 
of his real treasures — as a purchasing of gold and jewels in return for 
worthless stones, dust, and stubble. 

Especially is this disregard of wealth fostered by the rules and spirit 
of the monastic life. Not only does the convent tend to the creation 
of a class of men and women in just that pecuniary condition, which 
the politics and economics of nature cannot produce, though they im- 
periously demand it, namely, the condition in which we have just 
enough, and are neither very rich nor very poor; but it is notorious 
that, even where the covetousness of human nature has made the utmost 
inroads it has ever accomplished in the cloister, the consequent accu- 
mulation of property has been far less rapid than in the hands of in- 
dividuals in the world. Every man who is in the least acquainted with 
the history of monastic institutions, however violent may be his pre- 
judices against them, will admit that the products of industry, when 
controlled by their hands, are divided between landlord and tenant — 
between the party who has the capital, and the party who toils with 
his head or his hands — far less unequally than in any other class in the 
whole world. Granting that the abuses of the system are all they are 
said to be (which is, of course, very far from what truth obliges us to 
grant), still it is a palpable fact, that, however selfish, or covetous, or 
luxurious monks may in some instances have become, they never have 
sought money with that intensity of purpose which impels the man of 
the world to make the largest possible profit out of every article that 
passes through his hands, and to drive the hardest possible bargains 
with the poor laborer in purchasing the fruits of his toil. A person, 



19 

like a monk, who has only a life-interest in the possessions his society- 
may acquire, and who during his life only possesses property as a 
member of a corporation, with no individual right over a farthing, or 
over a foot of land, is, by the very laws of humanity, by the very nature 
of selfishness itself, less careful to store up boundless wealth, than 
those who, while they live, are absolute masters of every penny they 
possess, and who, when they die, can dispose of it to whomsoever they 
please. And thus it is that monks have ever been the best masters, the 
best employers, and the best landlords. 

In connection with this subject, the practice of celibacy by the Ca- 
tholic clergy, as well as by the monks, must not be overlooked. There 
can be no doubt, in any reasonable person's mind, that a man who has 
no family to provide for is less inclined to hoard than a man who has 
a numerous offspring to place out in life, and to enrich by his savings 
after death. The contrast is seen, perhaps, in its most striking forms 
in the cases of the prelates of the English and Irish Protestant Churches, 
and in the wealthy Catholic Bishops and Archbishops of the Middle 
Ages. Immense as was the treasure of the Church before the Reforma- 
tion, and immense as it has been in some parts of Europe and America 
ever since that period, the Catholic prelates have rarely been found to 
leave much property of their own at their death. What they have re- 
ceived from the revenues of their sees they have spent as fast as they 
have obtained it. In innumerable instances they have employed their 
riches on every possible work which was most beneficial both to the 
spiritual and temporal prosperity of their fellow-creatures; and when 
this has not been the case, still they have not joined that most perni- 
cious band of men, who heap gold upon gold and silver upon silver, in 
order that they may create for themselves and their descendants a high 
place among the great ones of the earth, and ennoble a family that has 
sprung from the multitude. 

Compare, on the other hand, the conduct of the Bishops and Arch- 
bishops of the Established Church in England and Ireland. Even the 
ingrained Protestantism of this country is disgusted when it learns the 
enormous fortunes, which again and again are accumulated by these per- 
sonages during the years they possess the revenues and patronage of 
their sees. A fortune of fifty thousand pounds is nothing for a Bishop 
to leave behind him. The episcopal savings must be reckoned by hun- 
dreds of thousands of pounds. Ministerial favor or chance raises the 
son of a shopkeeper or a country parson to the bench of Bishops, and 
straightway the whole energies of the new prelate are devoted to the 
storing up the fortune of a nobleman for his widow and children. Men 



20 

whose fathers stood behind a counter leave their sons incomes of many 
thousands ayear, andseethem marryingamonglords, and associating with 
the highest in the land. And all this is accomplished by the cold, bitter 
practice of that parsimony, which is destructive of all social prosperity 
and of the well-being of the poor. Thousands and tens of thousands 
of pounds, the representatives of the labors of multitudes, are annually 
drawn out of circulation, instead of being honestly spent, even in lux- 
uries, as fast as acquired, and all for the increase of the class of idle 
men of property. There is no more mischievous a being in the whole 
social scale, or one whose conduct tends more to the increase of pauper- 
ism and the widening the distance between rich and poor, than a Bishop, 
who hoards the revenues of his see, in order to leave a nobleman's 
fortune to his sons and daughters. 

Now, I would ask, what is it that our present social system demands, 
but the introduction of some device, among all classes of the commu- 
nity, which shall ensure a more equal distribution of the profits of labor 
between the employers and the employed ? Can we, without audacious 
folly, deny that the evil against which Socialism and Communism direct 
their frenzied attacks is a real, and not an imaginary evil? Is it not 
true that capital has more power over labor than it ought to have, and 
that the tendency of our social life is ever to increase that unhealthy 
influence, and to make the rich richer and the poor poorer in every 
succeeding generation? Can it be doubted for a moment, that any 
scheme, which, without violating the laws of property, or unduly check- 
ing the energies and enterprise of mankind, should increase the average 
income of the laboring poor to half as much again as it is now, while 
it diminished the number of those frightfully gigantic fortunes, which 
exist like mountains in the midst of the desert plains of our pauperism, — 
can it be doubted, I say, that such a scheme would be the most precious 
gift, which Providence could bestow upon this toiling and struggling na- 
tion, and would do much to save us from the wreck of revolution which 
is now desolating so many kingdoms of the continent of Europe, and 
from that more silent but more fatal bankruptcy and decay to which we 
are now most manifestly hastening? 

I do not hesitate to say, then, that such a remedy can be found in the 
propagation of those principles respecting poverty, celibacy, and mo- 
nasticism, which are bound up with the very life of the Catholic religion, 
and in the encouragement of that disregard of earthly wealth, which the 
Catholic religion tends to nourish in the bosom of its faithful children. 
Without any agrarian law, without one item of unjust taxation of a par- 
ticular class, without the shadow of countenance to the schemes of the 



21 

Socialist and the Communist ; here we have a system of faith and 
morals, which stimulates the rich voluntarily to descend from their ele- 
vation, not to join the ranks of pauperism, but of those who, though 
poor, are no burdens to the community, and who produce more than 
they consume; and which would erect in every city of the empire, and 
in every dozen or score of country parishes, an institution filled with 
men and women who would be the fairest of dealers, the most lenient 
of rulers, and the most liberal of landowners. Scattered thickly through- 
out the land, we should have one whole class of the population devoted 
to the counteraction of the ruinous tendencies of the general course of 
trade, commerce, agriculture and money-lending; one whole class whose 
business it would be, as fast as the eager excitement of an ambitious 
race overloaded with weight the upper stories of the social edifice, to 
replace the stones of the building in a lower position, and daily to 
strengthen that solid and humble foundation which is daily robbed of 
its strength by the passionate love of show and splendor of its ordinary 
inhabitants. Catholicism, including the celibacy of the clergy and mo- 
nasticism, is the only possible safety-valve for the superfluous steam of 
the vast engine of modern society ; and they who, as I have done, have 
come to learn by their own experience what Catholicism really is, in its 
children and in its general workings, are filled with a conviction, which 
no sophistry can shake, that in its propagation in this land is to be found 
the only permanent security for England's prosperity and greatness, for 
her freedom and for her peace. I do not mean that Catholicism must 
again become the established religion of the country. Far from it: so 
far as human foresight can tell, this will never be; and so far as human 
wisdom can judge, it would be well that this should never be. But 
seeing as I do the course of modern society, and the utter impotence of 
all political schemes and of all forms of Protestantism to cope with that 
awful evil which the popular eye, in its miserable, short-sighted folly, 
still fails to discern, but which is hurrying upon us with steps all the 
more fatally swift because they are noiseless ; and knowing as I do by 
the most careful observation what Catholicism is, both in theory and in 
practice, I place my only hope for this still great, and, in many things, 
this noble nation, in the cordial reception of the Catholic religion by a 
very numerous portion of all ranks and classes in the community. 

Having already stated what I have found to be the influence of a 
submission to the Catholic Church upon a man's freedom and inde- 
pendence of judgment on all matters not of faith, I now proceed to 
give an account of the effect it exercises upon the general faculties of 
the mind, not simply as leaving them to the unhindered development 



22 

of their native strength, but as exerting upon them a positive strength- 
ening and elevating power; as serving, in a word, to confer a true in- 
tellectual discipline upon the mind. And in saying this, I must again 
beg the Protestant reader to observe, that in asserting that Catholicism 
leaves the judgment perfectly free in all mutters not of faith, I am as 
far as possible from admitting that it enforces the shadow of intellectual 
servitude even in those things which are of faith ; that is, which are 
defined and laid down for belief by the Church herself. I most strenu- 
ously deny that the faintest degree of irrational domination is exerted 
upon me by the Church, even though her command that I should be- 
lieve all that she proposes to my faith is absolute, and brooks not a 
moment's hesitation. It is rigidly in conformity with the laws of pure 
reason that I should place an implicit reliance upon the declarations of 
an authority which I am convinced is a far more competent judge of 
religious truth than I can possibly be, and which, I am persuaded on 
sure grounds, is guided by a divine influence which supersedes the 
private deductions of my personal, unaided, reasoning powers. It is 
not slavery to believe the word of a competent witness; rather it is 
worse than folly to doubt it. It Is not slavery for a laboring man who 
knows nothing of mathematics, to rest in undoubting certainty in the 
conviction that the earth goes round the sun, though to his personal 
judgment the sun seems to go round the earth, because philosophers tell 
him that he is misled by appearances. It was not slavery in the Jews 
and Gentiles when they believed the words our blessed Lord spoke to 
them, because they saw the miracles he wrought. And in like man- 
ner, I am not a slave because I entertain no doubts of the truth of 
Catholic doctrines, when I see that the common laws of reasoning 
compel me to regard the Catholic Church as infallible. I cannot help 
believing what she tells me, just as I cannot help believing that the 
three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. Will any man 
who wishes to escape the imputation of craziness tell me that he should 
like to be allowed to believe that two and two do not make four, or 
that the earth is square, and not spherical? Does he feel uncomfort- 
able when he studies the demonstrations in Euclid's Elements, and 
wishes to be permitted to deny their cogency ? What would he say if 
some ignorant simpleton rose to express profound pity for his enslaved 
condition, and ask him why he did not exercise the inalienable rights 
of reason, and set up a new algebra or a new astronomy for his own 
private use and delectation ? 

And such, I can seriously assure the Protestant reader, is the feeling 
of intelligent and well-educated Catholics respecting the obligation 



A 



23 

under which they lie to accept all that their Church teaches. They 
do not wish to believe otherwise than they are taught, any more than 
they wish to believe that New York is situated in China. If we were 
to meet any person who claimed such a liberty in his geographical 
faith, we should all agree in thinking that he verged upon the insane. 
And just such is our judgment of the well-informed separatist from our 
Church. We pity him quite as much (at the least) as he pities us. 
We do not wonder at a Heathen, or a Protestant who knows nothing 
of the question, remaining out of the Catholic Church ; but that any 
man who cares for truth, honesty, and the laws of reason, should study 
the case between Rome and her opponents, and finally embrace the 
belief that any form of Protestantism is true, appears in our eyes a 
violation of the elementary rules of logic and common sense, very 
nearly as monstrous as a denial of the law of gravity, or of the com- 
monest facts of universal history. I do most confidently assert, that 
could the philosophical heretic discern the indescribable pity with which 
we regard his state of mind, and the contempt with which we treat 
the quibbles of his sophistry, he would be more puzzled to reconcile 
it with his theories of the intellectual bondage of Catholicism, than he 
had ever been in investigating the subtleties of the cloudiest of meta- 
physicians, Hindoo or Greek, Scottish or German. 

Let me also here call attention to the claim which the Catholic makes 
to the possession of a special faculty for the discernment of and belief 
in religious truth, in addition to those general preliminary proofs of the 
truth of the Catholic religion which address themselves to those who 
are without the Church, as well as to those who are within. Whether 
or no this claim be well-founded, I am not now discussing ; still, in 
examining into the intellectual influences of Catholicism, it must not 
be forgotten that we do assert that we possess this power. Every Ca- 
tholic divine will lay it down as an elementary truth of practical and 
doctrinal religion, and every convert from Protestantism will allege 
that the doctrine is confirmed by his own private experience, that the 
individual Catholic has a personal certainty of the truth and reality of 
the objects of his faith, which goes further than the mere external 
logical proof of the truth of Christianity as a religion from God, and 
of Catholicism as identical with Christianity. To the observer from 
without, this singular faculty will appear what is popularly called mys- 
ticism ; he will say that it is simply a delusion; that we have no tan- 
gible proof that we are not the sport of the fantasies of our imagina- 
tion, and that the pure intellect has no healthy work in producing the 
convictions I speak of. And that it will so appear to him so long as 



24 

he is himself deprived of this faculty, I do not deny. A blind man 
cannot conceive color, though he may feel by his touch the physical 
difference between one hue and another. We are all of us lost in 
amazement when we try to comprehend what is the faculty by which 
a dog, when shut up in a dark hamper, and carried two hundred miles 
away from his home inside a carriage, is no sooner set free than he 
returns direct to his former abode, though he has never before been 
at the place to which he was taken. In like manner the Protestant 
has not any conception of the nature of that mysterious gift which the 
Catholic Church terms the gift of faith, by means of which her chil- 
dren are brought into a certain contact (so to say) with the invisible 
world, and which makes them more sure of the truth of the doctrines 
of their religion than can be imagined possible for any cultivated 
mind, by those who are themselves not in possession of this super- 
natural power. 

Still, whatever may be thought of us, it is a fact that we are uncon- 
scious of that bondage under which we are popularly imagined to groan 
and writhe. So far from yielding an unwilling homage to authority 
against the suggestions of our better judgment, we look upon ourselves 
as the only thoroughly sane persons in existence. We regard man- 
kind in general, and our Protestant friends and fellow-countrymen in 
particular, as in some respects out of their senses. We have no more 
respect for their views than for the delusions of a madman who fan- 
cies himself a sovereign prince, and his cell in Bedlam a royal palace. 
We respect their motives, their intentions, their feelings, their goodness 
and amiableness; but as for their religious belief, and what they call 
their arguments and proofs, we only grieve that poor human nature can 
labor under such an infatuation as to count such perversions of com- 
mon sense worthy of the name of reasoning. 

To all that I have alleged in favor of the healthy and invigorating 
influence of Catholicism upon the mind, it will be objected, that were 
the case as I have stated it, the Catholic body in this country would 
hold a position among their fellow-countrymen far higher than they 
now possess, and would be distinguished for their literary attainments 
to an extent which it would be absurd to claim for them in their pre- 
sent state. I say nothing of the vulgar objection that in other coun- 
tries and other ages Catholicism has crushed rather than aided the de- 
velopment of the faculties, because I am speaking only of what has 
fallen more immediately under my own observation. The objection 
itself will not, in truth, bear a moment's examination, and our posterity 
will come to class it with the rest of the herd of John Bull's self-corn- 



25 

placent delusions, and admit that it is no more true that Catholicism 
depresses the intellect than that it teaches Frenchmen to eat frogs, while 
Protestantism teaches Englishmen to feast on beef. I confine myself 
to the state of English Catholicism alone, and have no hesitation in 
asserting that the exact state of English Catholic education and Eng- 
lish Catholic literature furnishes no test whatsoever of the intelligence 
and abilities of the English Catholic mind. I have anxiously and 
carefully compared the average range and power of the Protestant in- 
tellect with the Catholic, and I have possessed very extensive means 
for instituting the comparison ; and I do not hesitate to declare, not 
only that the young Catholic's mind is at least as able, as imaginative, 
as keen, as animated, and as courageous, as that of the young Protest- 
ant, but that the influence of our hitherto defective education has had 
far less depressing results upon our mental condition, than could have 
been possible under any form of Protestantism whatsoever. The faults 
of our education have not been our fault; they have been the inevitable 
result of circumstances over which we have had no control; they are 
rapidly passing away, and a progress towards a thoroughly satisfactory 
state of things is going forward with all possible speed. 

There can be little doubt, indeed, that a person who had judged of 
the state of the English Catholic intellect by the actual books it has 
produced, and is now producing, or by the estimation in which it is 
held by the Protestant world, would be taken completely by surprise, if 
he was thrown for some length of time among any fair average specimen 
of Catholics themselves. Let him for instance contrast the cleverness, 
the quickness, and the energy of a number of boys from Eton and 
Winchester, with an equal number from one of the best of the Catholic 
schools, or of a number of young men from Oxford and Cambridge 
with their fellows in age in Catholic seminaries, and he would confess, 
without a moment's hesitation, that so far from seeing any sign of 
intellectual deterioration in the youthful Catholic intelligence, there was 
a vigor, an activity, a healthy life of imagination, and an openness to re- 
ceive impressions of the purest and noblest character, which he had not 
been in the least prepared to find among them. 

If it be asked, how it is that when the means of secular training were 
to so great an extent torn from the Catholic body by the persecution 
of the law, there yet remained to them any such powerful instrument 
for preventing the entire stagnation of the natural faculties ; I reply, 
that taken as a mere means for cultivating the intellect, the Catholic 
religion stands pre-eminent among all branches of human knowledge. 
Bind and fetter the Catholic as you may ; tread him under foot ; 



26 

trample upon him; rob him of every earthly good; drive him from 
all intelligent society; burn his books; shut up his schools; denounce 
him as a slave, till you have done your utmost to make him one; still, 
so long as he retains his religion, he has that within him which feeds 
the intellectual flame, and suffers it never to be wholly extinguished, 
and preserves in every faculty of his soul a marvellous elasticity, 
which will make it spring forth into life and action the moment that 
the repressing power is withdrawn, and he enters the lists with his 
fellow-countrymen a free and unpersecuted man. It is very true that 
English Catholicism can as yet boast of but (ew names which are 
eminent in any path of intellectual culture ; but then, how extremely 
small is that class of Catholics from which men of intellectual emi- 
nence generally proceed. Those who judge us by our numbers, 
judge us most falsely, because we are almost all poor, almost all 
approaching to paupers. That immense professional and middle class, 
which supplies almost the whole of the literary, philosophical, and 
scientific writers and thinkers of the age, not to mention its political 
celebrities, scarcely exists amongst us. Considering the paucity of 
our numbers, the wonder is that we have so many great names to 
show, and not that we have done no more. Most people, too, have 
little idea how many of those whom they extol with unbounded praise 
in the walks of science and art, are Catholics. I will not allude to 
individuals by name, but I cannot but repeat the assertion, that as his- 
torians, antiquarians, artists, and men of science, the English Catholics 
have done far more than could be expected of them considering their num- 
bers, and the overwhelming difficulties under which they have labored. 
And I entertain a strong conviction that before another generation has 
passed away, it will be found that Catholicism in England has grappled 
with the awful difficulties of the time, and has succeeded in ruling and 
guiding the intelligence of this day of trial and trouble, to an extent 
which must seem visionary and impossible to those who know not the 
astonishing strength that is hidden in her faith and morality. 

The source of this intellectual discipline is to be found in the nature 
of those subjects of thought to which the Catholic religion directs 
the minds of its followers. While every division of Protestantism is 
of so vague, inconsistent, varying, and depressing a character, that 
minds of a high order, and free energetic spirits, find pleasure and 
training for their powers only in criticising its statements, destroying 
its foundations, and detecting its absurdities, Catholicism calls forth the 
energies of the mind by a directly opposite process. It is by the con- 
templation of the perfections of Catholicism, by repeated examinations 



27 

into the strength of its basis, by the study of its wondrous scientific 
completeness, that the Catholic intelligence is disciplined. The Pro- 
testant exults in the destruction of the follies which he sees to have 
enthralled his Protestant brethren of less keen penetration than him- 
self. The more he searches into his own belief, the more incon- 
sistencies he discovers, the more is he startled at the intellectual 
imposture to which mankind have been giving credence. Protestant 
theological science consists in a systematizing of unbelief, in the gra- 
dual erection and completion of a system of philosophy which, while 
it assumes the name of Christianity, is virtually a denial of everything 
positive and distinctive in Christianity as a revelation, and is nothing 
more than Deism, Pantheism, or Atheism, under a new designation. 

With us, the very reverse is the fact. Every fresh addition to the 
philosophy, the poetry, the moral or dogmatic science of the Church, 
is an addition to the strength and durability of her entire system. We 
destroy nothing. We develop, we add, we expound, we illustrate, we 
enforce, we adapt, but we never take away or deny what was once 
held. And thus it is that the employment of the faculties of the mind 
in the contemplation of the theology and practices of Catholicism, even 
when every other means of education is rent away, is sufficient to com- 
municate a certain measure of intellectual vigor and keenness. The 
mind is perpetually directed to the examination of a vast, far-stretching 
body of truths, relating to the profoundest possible subjects of thought, 
arranged, defined, analyzed, and connected by the labors of centuries 
and centuries; expounded in books in every language, embodied in 
devotions of every kind, illustrated by innumerable ceremonies and 
customs, and accompanied with the practice of a system of morals, in 
comparison of whose scientific completeness it is not too much to say, 
that the ordinary moral and physical sciences of secular life are but as 
the guess-work of a speculator or the crotchets of an empiric. Under 
the influence of this extraordinary system, the pure reasoning powers, 
the imagination, the taste, with the whole of our moral being, romantic, 
self-sacrificing, shrewd, and practical, undergoes a degree of drilling, 
so to say, which I believe to be utterly incomprehensible to those who 
judge of the effect of theological science upon the intellect by the results 
which they see produced by the positive creeds of Protestantism, such 
as they are. 

Such, then, are, on the whole, the results of my personal experience 
of the intellectual effect of a submission to the Church, and of the ob- 
servations I have been able to make on the subject. I shall next 
request the reader's attention to its moral influence, leaving the 



28 

influence of its peculiar theological doctrines and its supernatural 
claims to another opportunity. 

What is the popular English belief with regard to Catholic morality- 
need not be described at any length. It is clear enough that we are 
thought to be — to use the word in its scientific sense — monsters. We 
are esteemed a sort of lusus naturae, a combination of the great and the 
vile, of the rigid and the licentious, of the benevolent and the cruel, 
such as is nowhere else to be found in the entire range of humanity. 
Almost every body is more or less afraid of a Catholic. A kind of 
power of fascination is attributed to us, such as is possessed by some 
of the snake species. Men of shrewd sense, calm and not easily led 
away by their fears, seldom feel thoroughly safe in dealing with 
Catholics. They fancy that our movements cannot be calculated 
upon like those of other men ; that we alternately bind ourselves as 
slaves, and take the most inconceivable of liberties; that at one mo- 
ment we aim at living like angels, and at another are content to become 
as devils. The one thing above all others which is attributed to us is an 
unconquerable and impenetrable secrecy in all our dealings, which is 
supposed to be carried to the highest- extent by the Catholic clergy in 
their dealings with the laity, and with Protestants of all descriptions. 
This is, on the whole, the popular belief among candid Englishmen; 
while there is a multitude of persons, who, for want of a better term, 
may be styled the fanatics of Protestantism, who simply regard us as 
incarnate demons, the victims of deadly delusion, the blinded instru- 
ments of an atrocious scheme of deception, devised and carried on by 
a profligate priesthood and hierarchy. As these last, however, will 
probably not read a word of what I have to say, or if they do read it, 
will suppose that I am writing under the dictation of some crafty priest, 
monk, or Jesuit, it is needless to show that their ideas of Catholicity 
are the mere ravings of folly, and that it is literally impossible that the 
Catholic religion could exist and spread as it does among respectable 
and intelligent men and women of all countries, ages, ranks, and incli- 
nations, were it in the slightest degree such as they suppose it to be. 
I address myself solely to those persons of common sense and chari- 
table intentions, who knowing Catholicism only from the representations 
of vehement anti-Catholic writers, are yet staggered in the belief in 
which they have been brought up by undeniable facts of a diametrically 
contradictory character, and who would fain know whether or not 
Catholics are that strange compound of good and evil which the candid 
philosophical observer accounts them. I shall perhaps best commu- 
nicate that clear knowledge of the facts of the case which I desire to 



29 

fnrnish, by taking in detail some few of those points of Catholic prac- 
tice which are believed to be most injurious to pure morality, and of 
those views which we are believed to hold in violation of the sim- 
plicity of Gospel strictness. 

First, then, with respect to the personal character of our clergy, and 
of the members of religious orders. It is undeniable that Protestants, 
even the most charitable, are extremely suspicious of the moral character 
of a large body of men, like our clergy; and of cloistered institutions, 
like our monasteries and convents, where hundreds and hundreds of 
men and women are subjected to what is supposed a most unnatural 
restraint, at the same time that they are withdrawn from the sight of 
the world, and enabled to perpetrate all sorts of wickednesses un- 
checked by the voice of public opinion. I suppose that there is per- 
haps net a Protestant in England who does not in his heart believe 
that the clergy of the Established Church, if not the body of dissenting 
ministers, are a more moral, more pious, and more modestly retiring 
class of men than the eight hundred popish priests of Great Britain, to 
say nothing of the monks and Jesuits. They feel convinced that 
though many of our clergy may be men of irreproachable lives, and 
devoted to the welfare of their flocks, yet, that if they could see behind 
the scenes, they would discover many a shocking exception, even if it 
did not turn out that the immoral Catholic clergy were more numerous 
than the correct and self-denying. 

What, then, has been the result of my personal knowledge of the 
moral condition of our clergy? I most solemnly assure my readers 
that I have only heard of one solitary instance of immorality among 
them, while that one was of a far less heinous character than would be 
at all supposed. The priest in question was given to drinking a lit- 
tle too much, and is now, I believe, thoroughly reformed. Persons 
may start at this statement, and think it a glaring falsehood, or an im- 
possibility ; but nevertheless, I assert that it is true. I have never even 
heard of, much less known, more than this one instance of clerical 
misconduct among the English priesthood. Of course, there may be 
others ; perhaps there are ; I can only speak as far as my experience 
goes ; but unquestionably so far as it does go, and that is to a very 
considerable extent, the fact is as I have alleged. Nor, again, am 
I saying anything of other faults of a different species from those 
which are popularly described by the word immorality, when applied 
to an individual; I do not say that every one of the Catholic clergy is 
an immaculate saint, who never by word or deed transgresses the most 
minute precept of the moral law of God. All have their infirmities, 



30 

because all are still in the flesh, still encompassed with trials, and often 
harassed and proved beyond the ordinary lot of men. I am speaking 
at present of that general correctness and irreproachableness of life 
which we have a right to expect from every member of the priesthood, 
and in which the Protestant world supposes that they fall so grievously 
short of their duty. 

Compare this fact, then, with the condition of the Anglican clergy, 
and mark to which class the palm of purity of life is to be assigned. 
Let any man who has had the means of knowing them, as I have 
known both them and the Catholic clergy, call to mind the results of 
his experience, and ask himself whether the contrast is not most favor- 
able to the Catholic religion. There is not a person who is familiar 
with the discipline of the Established Church, and with the ecclesias- 
tical and criminal courts of this country, who could not, with five 
minutes' reflection, count up a score or so of cases which have come 
under his own personal knowledge, in which, from deans down to 
curates, the moral law has been flagrantly violated by crimes, varying 
from such as it is forbidden for pen to describe, to that swindling and 
perjury which is barely esteemed immoral in the lax judgment of com- 
mon men. Let any person recall the circumstances which have come 
under his cognizance during the last ten or fifteen years, and he will 
be constrained to admit, that if there is any class of ecclesiastics who 
practically answer to those pictures of scandalous vice which he has 
been brought up to believe to apply to the Catholic clergy, that class 
are the clergy of the Church of England. I am not asserting, be it 
remembered, that all the Established clergy are immoral, or that a 
majority of them are immoral; but I do say that the proportion of the 
scandalous to the decent livers in the Establishment is far, far greater 
than in any portion of the Catholic Church in which I have ever had 
an opportunity of ascertaining the true state of affairs. The case is 
also just the same in the religious orders. The monks are almost in- 
variably men of irreproachable correctness of conduct; while as to the 
convents of women, I am morally convinced that there is no such a 
being as a nun of questionable character in the entire kingdom. 

I will, however, go much farther than this, and profess my sincere 
conviction that an immense majority of the Catholic priesthood and 
members of monastic orders are not only persons of correct life, but 
thoroughly religious persons, whose hearts are sincerely given to the 
service of God, and who love Him with that true affection which He 
will recompense with eternal life in heaven. As I have already said, 
they vary considerably in degrees of sanctity, from that of the most 



31 

exalted piety downwards ; but nevertheless it is impossible to know 
them personally and intimately, to see them in their hours of relaxa- 
tion as well as to meet them in the confessional, to hear them in the 
pulpit, or to see them by the bedside of the sick; — it is impossible to 
learn their weaknesses and their trials, as well as their powers and their 
successes, without being impressed with a moral certainty that in the 
last great day there will be few of the English Catholic clergy to 
whom their Master will not say, "Well done, good and faithful ser- 
vant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." I am the last person in 
the world to entertain a superstitious respect for any person, or to close 
my eyes to what I might see or ought to see; but I cannot help record- 
ing my experience, and saying, that as far as I can remember, I never 
yet met with a priest who did not appear to me to have a conscience, 
to be alive to the paramount claims of Almighty God to the undissem- 
bled homage of his heart, or who shamefully neglected the ordinary 
duties of his sacred calling. Nor do I wish to speak, with unnecessary 
harshness, of the Protestant clergy, with very many of whom I have 
lived on terms of affectionate intimacy, and for some of whom I still 
entertain a sincere respect and hearty regard ; but when I come to com- 
pare their apparent religiousness, as a body, with that of the Catholic 
priesthood, I see that while the latter are (as far as I know) habitually 
influenced by the fear and love of God, the former are generally more 
decent men of the world, who make a compromise between its service 
and a devotion to its comforts, and the claims of religion to their whole 
hearts. When I have had to do with Protestant clergymen, or con- 
versed with them on any practical or spiritual subject, it was only in 
exceptional cases that I found I could reckon upon their being in- 
fluenced by a religious motive, worldly prudence and ecclesiastical 
party spirit being the ruling guides of the majority; while the Catholic 
priest is ever accessible to reasons or ideas founded upon the will of 
God, and the general happiness of his fellow-creatures. 

As to the popular idea of Romish priestcraft, it is simply a fiction. 
That assumption of something like personal infallibility which is so 
intolerably offensive in very many of the Anglican clergy, is really 
scarcely known among Catholic priests. It is a rare thing to hear a 
priest claim any more deference to his personal views or expositions 
of doctrine than ought reasonably to be conceded to those who have 
made religious questions their especial study. Protestants may rest 
assured that the notion that the clergy have any right to domineer over 
the consciences of the laity, that a priest always claims to decide every 
question ex cathedra, that the laity as generally stand in slavish fear of 



32 

the opinions, the censures, or the denunciations of the clergy, is a 
pure creation of the imagination, contradicted by the facts of every 
mission in England, and radically opposed to the great Catholic doc- 
trine that the Church is infallible, and not the individual members of 
the priesthood. 

In like manner, what is termed the Bon is a rarity in the Catholic 
Church ; so much so, indeed, that I despair of making many of my Ca- 
tholic readers understand the sort of creature whom Protestants designate 
by the term. I do not say that such beings never exist among us; but 
I do say that they are to be found in a far less proportion to the num- 
bers of our clergy, than in the Established Church. Empty-headed 
assumption; an oracular manner of giving vent to common-places; 
a practicing upon the simplicity or ignorance of inferiors in rank or 
intelligence ; a deliberate repetition of canting, high-sounding phrases, 
which serve only to deceive the unenlightened and to amuse the keen- 
sighted ; a sham, pompous, artificially dignified manner ; — these are 
not the ordinary faults of the Catholic clergy, as they are but too com- 
mon among that body which is the loudest in its declamations against 
Romish tyranny and priestly craft, and which regards a Catholic priest 
as a sort of respectable monster, a compound of deceitfulness, cunning, 
cleverness, zeal, and despotism. In fact, our clergy sometimes carry 
the openness of their character and manner to an extreme. They are 
really at times too open, too honest in what they say, too little studious 
of appearances, too ready to give other people credit for good inten- 
tions, and to expect a charitable interpretation of their words and con- 
duct from a censorious world. Nobody that knows them can possibly 
pretend that they are apt to put on an exterior which belies their real 
nature; that they hide themselves from the eyes of the world and of 
their flocks by the assumption of an unnatural, stiff, pompous manner, 
or by affecting to be better than they are in reality. If they err at all 
in the matter, it is with that most amiable and pardonable error which 
no Christian man can find it in his heart severely to condemn, the error 
of thinking too well of mankind in general, and of their friends and 
acquaintances in particular. 

Here, too, I should introduce that one feature in the intercourse be- 
tween the priesthood and the laity which is viewed with especial 
dread and suspicion by the Protestant, the discipline of the confes- 
sional. Amid the vast varieties of opinion which the separatist world 
entertains respecting this momentous subject, it is undeniable that all 
Protestants regard confession as a terrible engine in the hands of the 
clergy for exercising an undue power over men's souls. One, a zea- 



33 

Ions Protestant, views the whole practice with nndissembled horror; 
one, a timid old lady, or a country parson, devoutly believes that by 
means of confession the priests instill every species of abomination into 
the minds of their flocks, especially into the young ; a third, a philo- 
sophical politician, or an intensely candid Anglican, admits that great 
good may often result from confession, but is confident that great spirit- 
ual tyranny also is its very frequent result; a fourth, an ultra-Roman- 
izing Puseyite, or an anxious, trembling, devout person who longs for 
some practical guidance, is convinced that the system is full of benefit, 
to those who judiciously employ it, but is possessed with an unde- 
finable dread of its mysterious powers, and cannot believe that it is not 
frequently most terribly abused. All agree in thinking that the abuse 
of the confessional is anything but rare. 

To this I have again to reply, that if there is any fault to be found 
with the Catholic clergy, it is directly on the opposite side from that, in 
which they are supposed to sin. If they err in directing the con- 
sciences of their flocks, it is in exercising too little authority over them, 
rather than in exercising too much. Unquestionably there is a very 
considerable variety in their claims to be considered as good spiritual 
directors ; but it is equally undeniable; that, if any are ever to be found 
fault with, it is in being too considerate, too forbearing, too cautious of 
interfering with our personal wishes and free judgment. I can most 
solemnly say, that I never heard of such a thing as a priest making 
mischief in a household, coming between its various members and set- 
ting them against each other, or practising upon the simplicity and obe- 
dient spirit of his penitents for his own benefit, or for the benefit of his 
order. I have often heard complaints made, both by born Catholics 
and converts, that confessors left them too much to themselves ; and I 
have occasionally, though rarely, heard of a priest asking questions 
which showed that he wanted a power of discriminating character, or 
that his ideas of his office were narrow and unattractive ; but never 
have I known or heard of an instance in which the confessional was 
employed as an instrument of tyranny ; as a vehicle for instilling a 
knowledge of sins, hitherto unknown, to the innocent mind; or as a 
source of misery and discomfort to a household. 

My Protestant readers may smile, but I must assure them that the 
laity are a far greater plague to the clergy in the confessional than the 
clergy to the laity. If at the time of confession one of the two parties 
concerned is a master and the other a slave, it is certainly the priest 
who is the slave and the penitent who is the master. Again and again 
have I been astonished at the patience, the forbearance, the endurance, 
3 



34 

with which a Catholic priest will listen for hours after hours, in the hot, 
stifling, poisonous atmosphere of a crowded chapel, to recitals which 
try human calmness to the uttermost, so confused, so needless, so diffi- 
cult to comprehend and elucidate, that one wonders how the priest's 
brains can stand the wear and tear, and he can come forth as unruffled 
in spirit as he is exhausted in body. The confessional, indeed, is in 
some cases an infliction; but it is an infliction of which by far the 
largest portion falls to the clergy and not to the laity. Its trials are 
perhaps as great as its blessings, and these latter are great and wonderful, 
but the trials and the blessings are not equally shared between priest 
and penitent. The former, abundant as are the consolations which he 
receives as well as bestows, has far more than his share of the pains 
with which the guidance of immortal souls is of necessity ever accom- 
panied. However, of the general influence of the practice of confession, 
as a portion of Catholic discipline, I shall say more hereafter. Now I 
pass on to the observations I have been able to make on the results of 
the monastic system on those who are subjected to its restraints. 

And here again I find it difficult to realize to myself the exact nature 
of the feelings which I know that the Protestant world entertains to- 
wards monks and nuns of every kind. So completely is the Catholic 
Church a new world to those who enter her pale, that, after a very short 
time, it becomes almost impossible to enter into the minds of those who 
are still without her fold, or to recall what we ourselves once thought 
and felt in common with the rest of our Protestant fellow-countrymen. 
So singularly unlike is it to be a Catholic to what it is imagined from 
without, and so marvellously does the whole system of Catholic faith 
and practice enter into one's whole life and absorb one's very nature 
itself, moulding one's every idea, sentiment, and liking after that very 
model which prevails throughout the whole of Catholic Christendom, 
that, before a few months have passed away, the convert has forgotten 
that he ever was different from what he has now become, and can hardly 
convince himself of the fact that he once entertained opinions respect- 
ing the Church and her children which now he laughs at as the most 
childish of absurdities. We seem as if the first part of our lives had 
been one long dream, and as if our eyes had been opened to realities 
for the first time on the day when we were reconciled to the Church. 
We wonder how we could ever be so deluded as to fancy those visions 
of brightness, truth, and love which formerly we worshiped to be any 
thing more than the phantasms of our own imagination. Having now 
the free exercise of our faculties, we can scarcely persuade ourselves 
that there was a time when we lived year after year in the same country 



35 

with the children of the true Church, with her temples open all around 
us, with her clergy ready to converse with any who came to them, with 
books in abundance to tell of her doctrines and system, with monasteries 
and convents scattered about the country, ready to show hospitality to 
the most vehement of opponents, and yet could pass our lives in an 
abject servility to the vulgarest of prejudices and the most irrational of 
theories, without troubling ourselves to ascertain, by the employment 
of our common sense, whether facts were such as we had been taught 
to believe. ' 

Hence I find it difficult to meet the popular feelings about monks and 
nuns with any fully intelligible and satisfactory answer, because I now 
can scarcely realize those feelings, or suppose that my sensible and well- 
disposed fellow-countrymen can be so preposterously absurd in their 
prejudices as I nevertheless know them to be, because I was once as 
absurd myself. I am confident that they will not trust what I tell them, 
or believe that, whatever be the true character of the inmates of the 
cloister, it is such as I assert it to be. So deeply are they possessed 
with what they imagine must be the result of the peculiarities of the 
monastic life, that they will hardly fail to receive my statement as a 
romance, as a tale conjured up by my own excited imagination, and 
contradicted by what facts would appear to be, if they could only see 
into them. -■ 

Yet the truth must be told as it is, and, while the world thinks with 
alternate horror, indignation, contempt, and pity upon the inhabitants 
of the cloister, I must repeat my conviction that they are the happiest 
people upon earth. As a Catholic, I of course consider that, taken as 
a body, the members of the religious orders are the most holy of all 
Christians ; for great as are the miracles of sanctity which Almighty 
God accomplishes in the secular clergy of the Church, and even in the 
privacy of domestic life in every rank and grade of society, still it will 
scarcely be questioned by any Catholic that the highest degrees of holi- 
ness and love are so often accompanied with a vocation to the monastic 
life, that, as by a kind of natural law, a considerable proportion of the 
saints of Christianity will be found dwelling in the cloister as contem- 
platives, or occupied as members of some active order in ministering 
to the poor and sick, or teaching the ignorant. It is therefore a mere 
statement of common Catholic belief, to say that monasteries and con- 
vents, whatever may be the occasional exceptions to the rule, abound 
with men and women of fervent piety and devoted love to their fellow- 
creatures. That which the world will be least prepared to hear, is the 
testimony of an observer to the remarkable and uniform cheerfulness 



36 

and happiness which fills the breasts of persons cut off from all the 
ordinary sources of human pleasure and enjoyment, and subjected some- 
times lo the severest bodily austerities, and always to the discipline of 
a military obedience. 

I can, indeed, scarcely conceive a greater contrast than exists between 
the interior of many a convent and the strange gloomy conceptions 
which Protestants in the world entertain respecting it. The rough 
black, white, or brown habit in which the monk's or nun's figure is 
generally wrapped ; the uncouth substitution of these ungainly garments 
(as they are thought) for all that makes the female form and countenance 
so charming in the eyes of man, and of woman also; the unvarying 
monotony of a life, which, for twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty long years, 
is passed within the walls of one single house, and the enclosure of one 
small garden; the thought that every moment of every hour in every 
day in all those revolving years is subjected to the rigid regulations of 
a written rule, and the direction of a superior who is but an erring, 
fallible mortal; that father, mother, brother, sister, come to see the nun 
but as visitors — as half-friends, half-strangers — as her kindred, and yet 
as having no claims or rights over her; and that a most solemn vow has 
bound her irrevocably to this voluntary death, until the last hour of mor- 
tality arrives, and she passes into eternity, untended by one hand that 
owns the relationship of blood or marriage; — all this impresses the 
popular mind with a mournful and angry feeling, and makes it think of 
these victims of a superstitious creed as the most miserable and unfor- 
tunate of earth's inhabitants. Yet I can most conscientiously say, that 
convents and monasteries are, without a solitary exception, the happiest 
and most cheerful places in the world. As in everything else, there 
are differences between one religious house and another, not only in 
their strictness and spiritual fervor, but in the general tone of mind 
which pervades the community. Some are more grave and silent, others 
more lively and given to conversation. In some the labors of mercy 
for the poor are so exhausting, that they leave hardly spirit and strength 
for much vivacity or merriment. In others, severe austerities are borne 
with a redoubled energy of patience, through the perpetual buoyancy 
of spirit w 7 hich a daily recurring recreation of the most animated species 
confers. Yet the rule will be found to hold good universally, that the 
cloister is a more cheerful place than the world without. Its inmates 
have a sunshine in their hearts, which, strange and inconceivable as it 
must appear to those who know Catholicism only by false report, is 
both the result of the peculiarities of the conventual life, and its never- 
failing support and consolation. 



37 

Nor let it be supposed that, because the monastic spirit severs in twain 
those ties of affection which hold society together, and are the sweetest 
charm which this world has retained since Paradise was lost, therefore 
the hearts of monks and nuns are cold and hard, unfeeling towards one 
another, and destitute of affectionate sympathy towards those who are 
still occupied in secular affairs. Nothing could be more false than such 
a supposition. Every Catholic who has had much intercourse with 
them, whether in England or abroad, unites in bearing testimony to the 
fact, that not only are they among the most agreeable, hospitable, in- 
telligent, and often most polished persons to be met with, but that their 
kind-heartedness, practical benevolence, and readiness to love all, is one 
of their most striking features. An undeniable proof of the bright, 
happy, attractive spirit which pervades the cloister is to be found in the 
circumstance, that wherever they keep a school, of any description, 
they win the affections of the young with an irresistible power, and 
attach to themselves throughout after-life almost all who have ever been 
under their care. 

Still further, it is a remarkable illustration of the gentle and cordially 
sincere character of the inmates of religious houses, that a large pro- 
portion of many of them is made up of persons who were originally 
brought up in their schools, and who have either chosen never to leave 
them, or, when circumstance" have permitted it in their after-career, 
have returned at once, as a bird to its nest, to that home of peace and 
happiness which in their childhood they felt to be truly a refuge in the 
midst of the sorrows and sins of this time of trial. Incomprehensible 
as is the enigma which the monastic state presents to the speculative 
and liberal-minded Protestant, who judges of its nature by the feelings 
he perceives working in his own mind, and by the principles and habits 
of common secular life, those who know it by personal experience, at 
the season when the heart is least likely to be led away by theories, 
and is still unsaddened by the bitter experience of after-years, furnish 
the most signal attestation of its delights, by constantly flying to it and 
embracing it as their portion, at that very age when pleasure is most 
intoxicating and the future seems most brilliant, and care and anguish 
have not imprinted one single furrow upon the brow. We know how 
singularly different is the feeling produced in Protestant schools, and 
even in some Catholic seminaries, towards those who are the instructors 
and managers of the young. So far from finding that seven or eight 
years passed at a great school, whether of boys or girls, induce the 
pupils in after-days to long for a return to the society of those who 
taught and governed them, and for a share for life in all their daily oc- 



38 

cupations, the very reverse is the almost universal consequence. Men 
and women never become schoolmasters or ushers, schoolmistresses or 
governesses, by choice. One laughs at the very idea. Yet in the Ca- 
tholic Church it is a fact, that if we want our boys to become Bene- 
dictines or Jesuits, and our girls to bury themselves in the cloister for 
ever, the best possible means we can take to ensure the fulfilment of 
our wishes is to send them to the schools of the religious order which 
we wish them to embrace, saying nothing at all to them about our wishes, 
but leaving things to work their natural way upon their youthful hearts. 
Nothing is, accordingly, more common than for parents to learn from 
their sons and daughters, just at the time that others are marrying and 
settling down amid the blandishments of the world, that they are strongly 
disposed to return to such and such a monastery or convent, and trust 
they have the permission and approbation of their father and mother. 
Doubtless the heart of many a freeborn Briton will swell with indigna- 
tion at hearing that natural affections are thus scandalously interfered 
with, and they will hate the cloister all the more because it is the fatal 
foe to those worldly prospects which the fond and foolish parental heart 
cherishes for its children. It is true that people who would consign 
their daughter with gladness to the arms of a wealthy husband, who 
lived thousands of miles away in India, or rejoice to purchase a com- 
mission in the army for a son, who would thus be practically banished 
from his home for ever, will exclaim with vehement wrath against the 
tyrannical cruelty and unnatural wickedness of those who would coun- 
sel a youth or a maiden to take the vows of a religious, and so break 
up the unity and enjoyments of a smiling family; I only state this as 
a proof that monks and nuns are so happy a class of beings, that they 
attract, in great numbers, those who at any time come under their 
charge, and that to the merry, light-hearted boy and girl they approve 
themselves the most favored and agreeable class of beings upon earth. 
Oh, wonderful power of grace and goodness ! At this very moment, 
while almost every individual in the Protestant world of England, who 
has any opinions at all on the subject, is viewing the life of the Catholic 
convent as either a life of dark, morose misery and gloom, or of un- 
bridled worldliness and licentiousness, — at this moment there is many 
and many a young heart within the Church that is rejoicing to put aside 
the wedding-garb, to quit the scene of gaiety and amusement, to part 
from all it loves most on earth, and refusing to give its love to any fresh 
object of mere earthly tenderness, and preparing to pass through those 
doors which open only to those who enter, and are closed to any who 
would fain return; and all this not by restraint — not because it has tried 



39 

the world's pleasures to the utmost, and found them wanting — not be- 
cause it had ceased to love its natural kindred — not because it is misera- 
ble — not because it is priest-ridden and superstitious — not because it 
has no means of support in the world, — but of its free, unbiassed will, 
after weeks, months, or years of reflection and prayer, simply because 
the "religious" life has attractions for it such as nothing earthly can 
offer, because it loves that life, and trusts to serve God more perfectly, 
and to do more good to its fellow-creatures, by thus withdrawing from 
the habits and customs of mankind, and devoting itself to Jesus Christ, 
alone. Wonderful also it is, and not less true, that at the same time 
there are many and many parents in this realm who, from the earliest 
infancy of their offspring, hope and desire for them no other destiny 
than they should thus flee from life at the very moment when it is most 
tempting and full of promise; that while the worldly father and mother 
look forward with joy to the fame, the wealth, the domestic bliss which 
is to be their child's portion when he grows up to manhood, or depend 
upon the affectionate care and solicitude of a daughter to soothe the 
sickness of their old age, these strange and incomprehensible parents 
should even pray to God to take their child from them, to sever the tie 
that binds them to nature, and to bind them by an irrevocable vow to a 
state in which this world is to be to them as though it existed not. Yet 
such is the fact, and such the deep-seated belief which many a pious 
Catholic entertains of the blessedness of the conventual life, that the 
more purely and unselfishly they love their children, the more earnestly 
do they desire to see them thus safe from the storms which make ship- 
wreck of so many souls. 

But we must pass on to two or three of those other points in which 
Catholic morality is especially misunderstood by those who are not 
Catholics themselves. Perhaps in no one point is this misconception 
more complete than in regard to our belief and practice in respect to 
truth and falsehood. For generations this Protestant country was guilty 
of the glaring absurdity of imputing to Catholics a disregard of the 
sanctity of promises and oaths, at the same time that it refused to alter 
the oaths which kept Catholics out of Parliament. So monstrous are 
the delusions which men can practise upon themselves, that for cen- 
turies Catholics were popularly believed to keep no faith with heretics, 
and to be habitually guilty of perjury, while no single instance could 
be found of a Catholic whose conscience would permit him to take the 
oath which kept him a slave in the midst of a free people. And though 
the English nation is now beginning to think that all Catholics are not 
necessarily scoundrels, still we see many signs that people scarcely 



40 

trust us — that they think us slippery, deceitful, and crafty beyond other 
men, and are suspicious of the actual doctrines which our clergy teach 
respecting the duty of telling the truth. 

I can declare, then, that so far as my experience and observation 
go, this idea is without a shadow of a foundation in fact. I never met 
with a Catholic priest or a Catholic layman who was not at the very 
least as rigid in his observance of the law of truth, both in word and 
in deed, as the most upright and honorable of Protestants. That a 
different rule is to be followed in keeping faith with heretics, from that 
which Catholics follow among one another, is a notion which I have 
never heard even broached among them, and never mentioned but as 
an instance of Protestant misunderstanding of Catholic opinions I 
have said that, at the very least, Catholics are as honest and truth-telling 
as Protestants, but I might say a great deal more; I might with strict 
correctness add, not only that they are much better informed as to what 
constitutes falsehood than Protestants, from their ignorance of moral 
science, can possibly be, but that they exercise a rigid watchfulness over 
themselves in speaking which is unknown to those w T ho do not practise 
confession as we do. There are a thousand little acts of trickery and. 
deception all but universal in the world, which the Catholic knows to 
be absolutely forbidden by the moral law, and which he avoids as sins. 
From the exaggerations and embellishments of mere conversation, up 
to the innumerable rogueries which are thought nothing of by men of 
the world, we are taught to mark the line between honesty and decep- 
tion with an unyielding severity of demarkation, to which the popular 
laxity of both rich and poor, men and women, is absolutely a stranger. 
I would counsel any candid inquirer who wishes to ascertain what our 
morals in this respect really are, to put the question to any respectable 
Catholic man in business, to a solicitor, a merchant, or a common 
tradesman, who at all bears the character of being a good Catholic, who 
attends to his religious duties, and to ask him whether he does not find 
his religion a positive hindrance to him in competing with Protestants, 
who think nothing of practices to which he entertains conscientious 
scruples, and who act upon lax ideas of truth and falsehood, from which 
he himself recoils. I am, indeed, most firmly convinced that the large 
majority of men who are called men of honor in the world, are habit- 
ually guilty of sayings and doings which, in the judgment of the Catholic 
clergy and all well-conducted Catholic laity, would be nothing better 
than swindling, lying, and perjury. 

A similar difference from the Protestant practice, even more striking 
in its nature and extent, is to be observed in the private conversations 



41 

of Catholics respecting the faults and sins of their fellow-men. I have 
not a moment's hesitation in asserting, that the universally recognized 
principle on which every decent Catholic controls his tongue, is all but 
unknown even to the better sort of Protestants. I need hardly remind 
my readers, that in the familiar conversations of private life, it is the 
habit of all classes and denominations to mention the moral faults of 
other persons without the slightest scruple, when inclination or the turn 
of conversation prompts it. I am not alleging that it is thought allow- 
able to say what is untrue of others, or to say what is true from a 
malicious and uncharitable spirit; but it will not be disputed that not 
one Protestant in a thousand considers it wrong to mention in a quiet 
way that such and such a person has been guilty of such and such a 
fault, or is influenced by such and such a sinful habit or feeling. A 
lady no more hesitates to tell her friend that she has just discharged 
her servant for theft, than to say that it is a fine morning. Gentlemen 
over their wine have no more scruple in repeating any stories they have 
heard of the immoralities of their acquaintances, than of discussing the 
previous night's debate in Parliament. Every Catholic child, on the 
contrary, is taught that not even to our nearest and dearest friends and 
kindred is it permitted ever to mention the moral faults of another per- 
son, unless they are matter of public notoriety, or unless the law of 
charity not only permits, but actually requires it. If I see my friend 
unwittingly putting himself in the power of a man whom I know to 
be a rogue, I am bound by my duty to my friend to warn him, in con- 
fidence, of what he is doing. If I have had proof that a certain pro- 
fessional man or shopkeeper is a swindler, there maybe cases in which 
I am imperatively called upon to prevent others from dealing with him. 
But until I am so summoned by charity to destroy my fellow-man's 
fair reputation, I have no more right to make his sins a subject of private 
gossip than to publish them in the columns of a newspaper. 

It will perhaps be said, that whether this be so or not, Catholics 
do not generally act on this rigid rule. I reply, however, that most 
unquestionably they do act upon it. I do not, of course, pretend that 
they never act otherwise. They are still sinners, even when most 
saintly, and the devil's temptations and their own bad inclinations, and 
evil example, at limes throw them off their guard, and hurry them into 
the sin of detraction which they condemn. But as a rule, I assert, 
without fear of contradiction, that the difference between Catholic and 
Protestant gossip is of the most striking character. You may go to a 
Catholic dinner, or a Catholic evening party, where perhaps there is 
not one who is what may be called an eminently saintly person, and 



42 

come away without hearing a solitary syllable spoken against the fair 
fame of a single individual. You may hear a vast deal said of others, 
and much, perhaps too much, that may, at first sight, appear free and 
unrestrained handling of their lives and characters; but, when you 
calmly review what you have heard, you will find that all this discus- 
sion and merry laughter has been confined to trifling personal pecu- 
liarities, which were perfectly harmless, and that you had heard no more 
evil of your neighbors, than you hear, when you are told that a man's 
nose is ugly or his hair is turning gray. And the same forbearance is 
practised with reference to Protestants as to Catholics. The rule holds 
good to all alike. . The reputation of every human being, from the child 
to the hoary sage, from the servant to the prince, we esteem a sacred 
possession belonging to him, of which we have no more right to rob 
him, than to help ourselves to a man's silver spoons, or to forge his 
name to a cheque. I am convinced, that no acute or watchful Protest- 
ant could mix familiarly with Catholic society, and have his attention 
directed to these points, without observing a difference from the state 
of things, which prevails even in the very best disposed and most re- 
ligious Protestant society, which could be accounted for only by the 
admission, that the fear of God and the love of his neighbors habitually 
rule the Catholic's life to an extent unknown beyond the pale of 
Catholicism. 

Here, also, I cannot forbear alluding to a subject, which, though it is 
very far from creditable to English Catholics as a body, is yet accom- 
panied with mitigating circumstances, which bespeak the presence of 
deep-seated genuine religion amongst us in a very remarkable way. I 
allude to the excessive freedom and want of delicacy — to call it by no 
worse name — with which too many amongst us have occasionally been 
accustomed to handle each other's public acts and words, both in pri- 
vate conversation and in print. Compared to other classes and reli- 
gious bodies, Catholics attack one another with a virulence, an un- 
charitableness, a reckless imputation of motives, and an ungentlemanly 
coarseness of language, which can be paralleled in no other society 
professing to be guided by religious principles, and to be restrained by 
the rules of common propriety. This, I say, is the way, in which we 
appear to the looker on, who judges us by what he publicly sees and 
hears, and is naturally ignorant of the existence of that numerous class 
of Catholics, who mourn over these lamentable exhibitions of our 
foolishness and bad taste, and strive to the utmost to discountenance 
and repress them. To our shame we have to confess, that there is 
scarcely a rank or order of men amongst us which, during the last ten 



43 

or fifteen years, has not furnished one or more examples of persons, 
who have forgotten the laws of decency and charitable feelings, and 
displayed themselves before their fellow-Catholics and fellow-coun- 
trymen in a character, of which every reflecting man must be deeply 
ashamed. 

But here is the striking feature in all this violence of language and 
action, to which I would especially direct attention. These ebullitions 
of hasty temper and an uncharitable spirit of interpretation amongst 
us are not what they would be in any other class of men in the United 
Kingdom. They mean far less at the very time they are put forth, 
than they would mean in the mouths and from the pens of Protestants 
and men of the world ; and, when the first heat, which produced them has 
subsided, they are not followed by those permanent feelings of ill-will 
and hostility which inevitably result from the quarrels of others. It is 
marvellous how soon this fire and fury subside, and the smoke passes 
away, and the astonished observer perceives the wrathful combatants 
locked in a fraternal embrace ! Our quarrels are but a portion of the 
result of those penal laws, which have kept us behind the age in gene- 
ral civilization. Grown men among us Catholics are often like grown- 
up boys rather than like persons of mature years. We are rough, 
hearty, headlong, honest, open-minded, free of tongue, hasty of inter- 
pretation, and reckless of appearances ; but then, if we have the faults 
of youth we most unquestionably have its virtues, and we forget and 
forgive with as much facility, as we take offence and abuse one another. 
So certain it is that if we are not always gentlemen, we are always 
Christians. 

Again, as a further extenuation of our faults in this respect, it must 
be remembered, that we are extremely limited in numbers in our more 
respectable and educated class. The comparative proportion of our 
poor is enormous. Within that class, which comes forward before the 
public, almost every man is known to every other, so that not only can 
half-a-dozen wrong-headed people throw us all into confusion, but we 
cannot possibly separate ourselves into minor divisions, according to 
our personal tastes and notions, and act together without interfering 
with those who differ from us in subordinate and trifling details. But 
among Protestants it is not so. In the vast vortex of English society 
each phase of character, each combination of ideas, finds itself re- 
peated again and again in numberless instances; and when a man 
does not like the views and feelings of his associates, he quits them, 
and unites in action with others more akin to himself. Thus every 
section in the Establishment, in the political and in the literary and 



44 

scientific world, forms its own separate republic, with its ruling spirits, 
its periodicals, its books, its reunions, and its very phrases of speech 
and of manners. And these sections rarely interfere with one another 
in any such way as to bring out their real animosity before the general 
public gaze. The country forgets the intensity of that bitterness, the 
irreconcilableness of that hatred, which separates the Puseyite, the 
Anglican, the old High Church, the Socinian, Methodist, Evangelical, 
and the Calvinistic dissenter, the protectionist, the free-trader, the Whig, 
and the man of the people, each from all the rest. Protestants seem 
to agree, while in reality they are the deadliest of foes. Catholics 
seem to revel in assaulting and smashing one another, while in reality 
they are practically friends, and like headlong boys, make up their 
quarrels while still smarting from the bruises they have inflicted on 
each other. I am not, of course, defending such a state of things as 
the highest conceivable, or the highest practicable, among Christians. 
On the contrary, it is deeply to be deplored, and assuredly it is speedily 
giving way to a more healthy and truly Catholic public opinion amongst 
us; but still I am bold to assert, that its very faults are the faults of 
genuine, sincere, and hearty, though imperfect, Christians, while their 
existence is alone a sufficient proof of the utter fallaciousness of the 
vulgar English ideas of the disciplined craft and clever cunning which 
are supposed to be the great weapons, with which Popery would fain 
subdue the world. 

One more feature in the Catholic moral character must be briefly 
touched on before concluding this division of our subject. It is one, 
indeed, which demands peculiar delicacy in handling, and which a 
false sensitiveness might require me to omit altogether; but it is of such 
paramount importance towards the forming a just estimation of our 
religion, that I must, though briefly, allude to it. I refer to the purity 
of thought, word, and life which is found to exist among Catholics, as 
compared with their Protestant fellow-countrymen. There is no need 
that I should allude to the opinions that are rife in this country respect- 
ing the supposed licentiousness of foreign Catholic countries. I am 
testifying only to what I have heard and seen, and only so far mention 
the question of continental morality as to state my certainty that the 
real amount of morality or immorality which exists abroad is a sub- 
ject on which the general English reader has no possible means of in- 
forming himself of the truth. I believe that there never was a Catholic 
country abroad, which was more sunk in sensual wickedness than Eng- 
land was a hundred years ago; and that whatever may have been the 
temporary criminality of the upper classes, and the inhabitants of 



45 

towns, in some Catholic kingdoms, their agricultural population has 
always been far higher in the scale of morality than Protestant Eng- 
land ever was ; and that never was any Catholic country which retained 
the name of Catholic plunged into such an abyss of abominations as 
still are found in the Protestant countries of the continent. 

As to the present comparative state of English Catholicism and Protes- 
tantism in this momentous element of Christian morality, I have been 
impressed in the profoundest degree, since I became a Catholic, with 
the immeasurable superiority of the former over the latter. It will be 
understood, of course, that I am speaking in both cases of the average 
class of persons in the two communions, who pay a general regard to 
the dictates of their respective creeds, and publicly identify themselves 
with the Church to which they belong. It w r ould not be fair to com- 
pare the lives of the most devout of Catholics, with the most openly 
licentious of Protestant men of the world ; I therefore take on each 
side the ordinary class of persons who go to church on Sundays, who 
conduct themselves with propriety and general uprightness in their 
private life, who conscientiously believe Christianity to be true, and 
are what is popularly termed thoroughly respectable persons. Com- 
paring, then, the individuals of this class in the two communions, I 
perceive a difference between them in respect of purity of thought, 
word, and deed, which is truly astonishing, and which would probably 
be deemed incredible to those, who know human nature only as 
influenced by the Protestant creed. Undoubtedly, there are occa- 
sional exceptions to be found in the Catholic body, to what I have 
stated ; now and then persons are to be detected among the laity — (for 
among the clergy I never perceived the faintest trace of any such evil) 
— who, under the mask of decency and religion, are more or less slaves 
to their vile appetites, and insensible to the rigid purity, which Chris- 
tianity demands from all men ; but notwithstanding these exceptions, I 
should be blind if I did not see, that in the point I am mentioning the 
Catholic Church is literally another world of beings, contrasted with 
the Protestant. However rude or rough, however boisterous and un- 
civilized, however wanting in that refinement, which has nothing to do 
with real morality, and is the mere result of a high state of intellectual 
cultivation, the society of English Catholics, whether of grown-up 
men or of youths, is untainted with that grossness of language and 
sentiment, which, with a few individual exceptions, undeniably exists 
in every other class throughout the kingdom, however polished and 
refined it may outwardly be. 

I know, by long experience, what are the real habits of thought and 



46 

recognized principles of decent and respectable Protestants of every 
rank. I know what boys, and youths, and grown-up men, and per- 
sons of venerable age are, in the public schools, in the universities, at 
the bar, in the Protestant ministry, and in the higher ranks ; I know 
what is the tone of thought and feeling, which is accepted by them all, 
as natural, inevitable, and allowable through the overpowering strength 
of human passions ; and I cannot but perceive that the discipline of 
the Catholic Church is founded upon a depth of practical wisdom, and 
accompanied by a supernatural influence, which places her children, 
when tolerably obedient to her commands, so far above the level of the 
gross, sensual world, in which they live, that by most Protestants I 
should be treated as a deceiver for attempting to persuade them of what 
they account an impossibility. 

No person can become familiar with a Catholic college, or with 
Catholic boys at home under the parental roof, without remarking this 
extraordinary contrast. However deficient may be the Catholic semi- 
naries in many things which cultivate the intellect, however far they 
may occasionally fall short of that perfection of discipline which the 
Catholic Church desires of them, no man can compare their inmates 
with the inmates of Protestant schools, and with the general run of 
young men of respectable character, and fail to be astonished at what 
he sees. My readers may be assured that a Catholic boy, as such, is 
generally a different species of being from the Protestant boy. He 
frequently preserves his innocence, his simplicity, his openness and 
guilelessness of character, to an extent which I believe to be wholly 
without parallel among the best of Protestants. And at this very time, 
I am convinced that there are large numbers of grown-up Catholics in 
this country, especially among the priesthood, who have retained the 
freshness of their baptismal purity, and who know sin as a matter of 
knowledge only, and not of experience. The candid and well-meaning 
Protestant, whose credulity has been abused by horrible tales of Romish 
wickedness, and who contemplates with horror the prospect of the pro- 
gress of Catholicism among the families of decent and moral England, 
may be assured that, could he know this dreaded religion as it is, — could 
he personally test the practical result of that system of self-examination, 
and of that auricular confession which he believes to be pregnant with 
frightfully defiling mischiefs, he would indignantly cast away his pre- 
vious prejudice against the Catholic Church as one of the most accursed 
of delusions with which the enemy of men ever thwarted the Divine 
purposes of mercy to mankind. 

I can, however, linger no more on this branch of our subject; and in 



47 

another paper shall endeavor to bring it altogether to a conclusion, by 
showing what are the real influences of the reception of the peculiarly 
Catholic religious dogmas upon the minds of those who embrace them, 
and how far our spiritual character is what it is supposed. 

In recording my personal experience of the influence of the doctrines 
of Catholicism, and the remarks I have been able to make upon their 
influence on other Catholics, it may be as well to commence by stating 
the general character of that sense of relationship to the invisible world 
which the Catholic religion professes to work in the mind, with an 
efficacy peculiarly its own. 

I must remind the Protestant reader, then, that the Catholic Church 
claims to possess a power of communicating to her children a certain 
definite spiritual gift, which she terms faith, by which a pious Catholic 
is not only morally certain of the truth of all Catholic doctrines, and 
contemplates the actual spiritual realities which those doctrines speak 
of, as realities, and not as mere opinions, figments of the human mind, 
or logical deductions, having no existence apart from the reasonings 
which prove them. This faith she professes to communicate originally 
at baptism, and to restore when lost after baptism, by a worthy parti- 
cipation in the sacrament of penance. It is the result of that indwell- 
ing of the Holy Ghost in the soul, which accompanies baptism in the 
case of all infants whatsoever, and of all adults who receive bap- 
tism with the proper dispositions. In infants it begins its work the 
moment the dormant intelligence awakes to life and thought ; so that 
as fast as external teaching communicates to the growing mind the 
various dogmas of Christianity, so fast does the youthful Christian 
grasp them with the confidence of a living faith, and regard them not 
merely as the private opinions of its teachers, but as the word of God, 
and as positive, existing, and ever-present, though invisible, realities. 

What, then, ought we naturally to expect to find to be the conse- 
quence of a reconciliation to the Catholic Church in the case of a 
person who, though rightly baptized (probably) in his infancy, and 
thus made a member of the Catholic Church,* has grown to manhood 

* The Protestant reader will bear in mind, that the Roman Church teaches that 
every infant who is rightly baptized, whether by a Catholic, a member of the Church 
of England, by a dissenter of any denomination, including Socinians, or even by a 
Jew or Pagan, and whether by a man, a woman, ot a child, is thereby regenerated 
and made a member of the Roman Catholic Church ; and baptism is rightly conferred 
when the person baptizing pours water upon the person baptized, or immerses him 
in water, at the same moment that he utters the words, " I baptize thee in the name 
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," having himself the intention 



48 

in schism, perhaps in mortal sin, and certainly without partaking in 
those ordinary means of grace which Jesus Christ has appointed for 
keeping alive and maturing this great gift of faith which he received at 
his baptism? In such an individual, even if he has not forfeited his 
baptismal grace by mortal sin and wilful disobedience to the true Church, 
yet nevertheless the power of faith will be fearfully weakened, his hold 
upon religious truths will be feeble and trembling, and he will have 
become, if not like a blind man, at least like one whose eyes are dim, 
or who gropes his way along by the aid of the faint, flickering light of 
a half-extinguished lamp, instead of walking freely and courageously in 
the broad blaze of day. Consequently, if the pretensions of the Catholic 
Church be well-founded, and such a person be really re-admitted to the 
possession of this mysterious and wonder-working gift, he will neces- 
sarily perceive (if he be at all given to watch the phenomena of his 
own mind) that he has literally acquired a new faculty, that the un- 
seen world has become to him what it was not before, and that the 
range of his intellectual vision is not only far wider, but far keener and 
more sure, than while he continued a member of any Protestant com- 
munion. 

And such I have no scruple in declaring to be the case with myself, 
and with every person with whom I have conversed on the subject, 
and who was capable of instituting the necessary investigation into 
the processes of his own mind. And I am speaking, be it observed, 
not of those instances in which the convert has been undeniably a 
mere devotee of this world's vanities before his conversion, and in 
which it would be natural that invisible things should produce a 
totally new impression upon him, simply from the fact that now he is 
earnest, while formerly he was heedless of his soul, of eternity, and of 
God. I am examining the state of those who for years and years be- 
fore their conversion, have been laboring to the very utmost of their 
powers, and with all apparent sincerity, to save their soUls and to do 
the will of God; who, by constant prayer, meditation, mortification, 
and study, have striven to realize the mysteries of the Gospel, so far as 
they knew of them, and to preserve in their thoughts, an unceasing and 
vivid recollection of the tremendously momentous nature of that world 
which is unseen, but of whose existence they are convinced by irrefra- 

of doing that which Jesus Christ commanded when He instituted the ordinance of 
baptism. The private opinions of the person who baptizes have nothing to do with 
the efhcacy of the baptism, which depends simply upon his intending to do what 
our Lord commanded , whatever that was. 



49 

gable demonstrations of reasoning. Presuming, then, though most 
humbly, to hope that such was my own case while I was still a mem- 
ber of the Church of England, I cannot but be conscious, that, by 
submitting to the Church of Rome, and entering her pale, I have 
received a fresh and extraordinary accession to my powers of believing 
in the truths of Christianity and Catholicism, and of habitually re- 
garding the objects of faith, as living, eternal, ever-present realities. 
To a certain extent I believe that this increase came upon me at once, 
the moment that I was reconciled to the Catholic Church ; but as the 
feelings, at such a time, are naturally highly excited, it is almost im- 
possible for a person to analyze correctly the processes of his own 
intelligence, either at the hour itself, when the change in his circum- 
stances takes place, or for some lengthened period afterwards, during 
which the novelty of all, that is around and within, him produces effects 
upon the reason and the imagination which may be easily mistaken 
for purely spiritual results, which they have no real claim to be. 

Judging, therefore, by what I have perceived to be the permanent 
result upon the mind, I venture to say, that I have found the promises 
of the Catholic Church to be strictly fulfilled, and that reception into 
her bosom does confer upon the intelligence a power both of resting 
with undoubting certainty upon the declarations of the Church, and of 
realizing the presence and various attributes of the invisible world, to 
an extent to which I was previously an utter stranger. That which 
before I found an unconquerable difficulty, I now find to vanish before 
a well-directed effort of the will. Those duties, which before presented 
a repulsive and awful aspect, commend themselves to my inclinations 
with a sweetness and attractiveness which enchain the better portion of 
my whole being, however violently the evil propensities of nature at 
times may rebel. Those Catholic doctrines such as transubstantiation, 
the invocation of saints, the efficacy of the intercession of Mary, the 
reality of purgatory, the value of vicarious suffering and of the indul- 
gences granted by the Church, — these and other such dogmas, of the 
truth of which I was firmly convinced before I even thought of actually 
becoming a Catholic, but which I found it impossible to realize, with 
all the efforts I made, in accordance with the convictions of my 
reason, — all these have naturally become to me as truly a part of the 
eternal realities of the existing world, as the globe on which we dwell, 
the stars above our heads, or the bodies, with which we find ourselves 
clothed. I am not saying whether this is, or is not, enthusiasm, mys- 
ticism, self-deception, or any other product of the morbid action of an 
excited imagination; I only allege, that after instituting the calmest 
4 



50 « 

inquiries into my internal consciousness, and contrasting what were 
my past with what are my present sensations, and again, comparing 
the operations of my mind towards the invisible world with its opera- 
tions towards the visible, I have come to the experimental conviction, 
that the promise of the Catholic Church, that she will confer a new 
spiritual faculty upon the soul, is not a delusion, but that we actually 
are in possession of a mysterious power, — call it instinct, call it power 
of vision or contact, call it inward consciousness, or what you will, — 
which enables us to live on from hour to hour, under an habitual impres- 
sion of the reality of the being and attributes of God, of eternity, of heaven, 
hell, and purgatory, and of all the varied objects of the Catholic's faith, 
and which I am equally convinced is not possessed by conscientious 
Protestants, as such, whatever may be their creed, or whatever their 
struggles to obtain it. Baptized children, who are nominally Pro- 
testants, but really Catholics, are of course in possession of this gift; 
and its results are so marvellous, that observant Protestants constantly 
contrast the facility with which their children realize the truths of 
religion with the difficulties they themselves experience in piercing 
through the veil which hides God and eternity from their gaze. Nor 
do I presume to allege, that Almighty God may not, in his overflow- 
ing mercy, in certain exceptional cases, bestow upon religious sepa- 
ratists, who are in invincible ignorance, such an extraordinary effusion 
of his grace, as may open their eyes, with all the clearness of 
Catholic faith, to the mysteries into which natural sight cannot 
pierce. The Catholic Church expresses no opinion as to indi- 
viduals who are without her pale, and teaches nothing respecting 
subjects which are not revealed. But that the mental power of 
living in an habitual sense of the presence of God, and of realizing 
the truths of revelation, which is possessed by ordinary Protestants, 
even the most orthodox and the most devout, is at all to be com- 
pared to that which is the treasure of every sincere Catholic, I 
believe to be a purely gratuitous assumption, which will be denied by 
every person who, like myself, knows both Protestantism and Catho- 
licism by his own experience and trial. 

And the more observations I am enabled to make upon the mental 
condition of other Catholics, of all ages, ranks, and degrees of intelli- 
gence, the more numerous are the proofs I discover of the truth of 
what I have stated. Wherever I meet with a man or a Woman, an 
ecclesiastic or a layman, who is even tolerably attentive to his duties 
as a Catholic, I perceive the same facility of believing all that the 
Church teaches, and of recognizing Christian doctrines, not merely as 
the statements of well-proved opinions, but .as matters of fact. One 



51 

and all, they plainly show that to their minds the great mystery of exist- 
ence is cleared up ; the blindness which darkens the eyes of man by 
nature is in tfieir case cured. The three Persons in the blessed 
Trinity, the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ, the heaven in 
which the Mother of God and his other Saints are now interceding for 
them, the hell in which the reprobate are punished forever, the purga- 
tory in which the imperfect souls of those who love God are purified 
before admittance into heaven, the real presence of Jesus Christ in his 
glorified body in the consecrated eucharistic species, the actual com- 
munication of pardon to the penitent in the sacrament of penance, the 
possession of miraculous powers by the existing Church of the pre- 
sent day, the benefit conferred on the departed faithful by the prayers 
of the living, the reality of that spiritual help which sincere prayer 
infallibly brings down from God into our souls ; — all these things are 
clearly, to the Catholics with whom we daily associate, not mere doc- 
trines or opinions, but things, which they no more practically forget in 
action, than they forget that there are twenty-four hours in the day, 
and that a man must eat and drink in order to live. This, I repeat, is 
to be observed, not only in our greatest Saints, in men and women 
whose whole lives are given up to prayer and meditation, or to serv- 
ing Christ in the persons of his poor, but in every commonplace Ca- 
tholic who has any pretensions to be sincere, and to practice heartily 
that religion which he professes to believe. They have manifestly re- 
ceived a revelation from God. The heavens have been opened to 
them, and they are as men who see in the midst of a blinded race. 

At the same time, let it not be supposed that I mean that the Catholic 
is not as subject as any human being to that difficulty of fixing the 
attention upon invisible things, which forms one of the sore trials of 
our present state. Like the Protestant, at one time he finds it easy to 
withdraw his thoughts from secular objects, and, with an undivided 
thoughtfulness, to concentrate the powers of his mind upon the affairs 
of his soul; at another, with all the efforts he makes, with all the iron 
energy of an indomitable will, he experiences an almost absolute help- 
lessness of thought, when he would meditate, pray, or calmly adore 
his Almighty Lord. His difference from the Protestant consists in 
this ; that while the latter, when he has fixed his attention on the sub- 
ject which he desires, finds his soul still chained down to earth, by 
the want of some faculty of believing without doubt, and of contem- 
plating unseen things, as well as of believing certain doctrinal state- 
ments ; the former, even when his attention is most obstinate in re- 
fusing to be fixed, yet experiences no difficulty in recognizing the in- 



52 

fallible truth of his creed, and in acting towards the objects of his 
faith with the same facility of energy with which he conducts himself 
towards what he sees with his bodily eyes. The (ffivout Protestant 
will not dispute what I say, when I allege that so soon as he can dis- 
engage himself from the entanglement of his own inward thoughts, 
feelings, emotions, and convictions, and go directly out of himself, and 
fix his attention solely upon objective realities, apart from his own 
ideas, he is conscious of an awful, dreadful, distressing sensation of 
intellectual helplessness, which chills his fervor, daunts his energies, 
and throws him back, again and again, upon secular objects, as the 
only things which are really sure, the only things on which he knows 
he cannot be mistaken. If he is in any degree a thinking and candid 
person, and willing to subject the views in which he has been brought 
up to the test of rigid proof, the consciousness of the miserable defi- 
ciencies of any proofs which he can rely upon, repeatedly tortures and 
agitates him, and he feels as if he would give the world only to be 
convinced on irrefragable grounds that he is not trusting to a delusion 
of his own brain. And when he is least troubled with this conscious- 
ness of the sandy basis on which he is standing, and directs all his 
efforts to prayer, meditation, and contemplation of divine things, still 
he feels like one who is shooting arrows into the dark, and aims he 
knows not where. He stands, as it were, upon the edge of a beetling 
precipice ; before him is the vast, immeasurable expanse of ether, but 
all overspread with a dense and impenetrable gloom; he would fain 
look and see what is the mighty landscape that he knows lies spread 
beneath his feet, who are its inhabitants, to w r hom he shall call for aid, 
and where he shall be received when he descends into that boundless 
region ; but in vain he strains his eyes to see, and his ears to catch 
some clear response to the voice of his cry ; here and there a light 
gleams for a few moments, and he thinks all will be manifest, — but it 
is gone, and the darkness seems blacker than before ; — sounds — mu- 
sical, wild, unearthly — float upwards upon the breeze, and then all is 
still ; and he remains cold, trembling, hoping, fearing ; and returns to 
his own thoughts, to his dry, unsatisfactory knowledge, to reason, to 
argument, to self-inspection, as the only means that remain for learn- 
ing the mysteries that refuse to unfold themselves to his sight. 

With us all is different. Our difficulty lies in fastening our atten- 
tion, and in that alone. The cares and the pleasures, the sorrows and 
the joys, the excitements and the occupations, of secular life, distract 
and harass us ; while physical weakness occasionally renders all purely 
mental exertion almost impossible to our enfeebled brain; so that it is 



53 

at times with considerable difficulty we can enchain our minds, and 
force our thoughts to be obedient to our will, and pray or meditate with 
a perfect recollectedness and composure of spirit. But whensoever we 
can do this, even in the slightest degree, and if it be only for a few 
occasional moments in which we force our thoughts away from the 
excitements which would enslave them, then do we find all clear and 
open to our intellectual gaze. We are not agitated by doubts ; we 
know that we are right; the more we reflect, the more complete is the 
reasoning on which our religion is based; and the more we test it in 
practice, the more satisfactorily does it commend itself to our minds, 
and the more powerful do we find that faculty of faith which we have 
received. If the whole visible earth and heavens were in a moment 
to vanish from before our eyes, and God and his Saints and Angels 
were to appear before us, astounded, awe-struck, and humbled to the 
dust as we should' be, our souls would instantly recognize the in- 
effable sight as^the glorious manifestation of what we had ever been 
beholding by faith; it would be the very same world of beauty, 
majesty, and holiness, in whose presence we had been living, while it 
was still hidden from our carnal vision.* 

As especially connected with this feature in the Catholic's practical 
condition, I may here advert to what I have found to be the real place 
which the forms and ceremonies of religious worship hold in the Ca- 
tholic devotions. It is commonly believed that the externals of reli- 
gion are accounted of far more importance by Catholics than by Pro- 
testants ; and that we are practically dependent upon the accessories of 
public functions for the warmth of our religious feelings, in a very ex- 
cessive degree. Music, painting, architecture, sculpture, incense, vest- 
ments, bodily postures, and symbolical ceremonies, are popularly con- 
ceived to be almost essential to a Catholic's prayers , or, at any rate, 
to be esteemed by us of a value wholly inconsistent with the spiritual 
character of all true worship. Now, that we think more of them than 
many Protestants do, I most readily admit and maintain. We consider 

* It will be of course understood, that I am not here asserting that the Catholic 
does not experience those temptations against faith, whether in Catholicism, as the 
only true Christianity, in Christianity itself as a divine revelation, or in the being 
and goodness of God himself, which are the natural results of human infirmity, and of 
the snares which the devil places before our minds. These are, however, but tempta- 
tions, and nothing more; and except when deliberately entertained or yielded to, 
affect only his lower nature, not touching his regenerate will, or preventing his offer- 
ing to God the same homage of faith and obedience which he offers at those times 
when he is most free from such assaults and delusions. 



54 

that any voluntary neglect of external propriety and decency in the 
worship of God is a token of the absence of heartfelt love and devo- 
tion to his service. We say that it is the very law of our being, that 
where the heart is truly engaged, we should show, by our outward 
posture, gestures, and language, that it is so ; just as no man who had 
a request to make of another, would commence it by turning his back 
upon him. 

Further, we maintain that Christianity leads man to offer the best 
of all that he possesses to the visible service and honor of his God and 
Savior ; that as by nature we offer gifts to those we love on earth, 
not so much for their personal advantage, as for a token and expres- 
sion of our affection for them, so, by grace, man, redeemed, and regene- 
rated, consecrates to the Almighty offerings of all that he himself holds 
most choice and beautiful, of all that costs him most labor and thought, 
of all that the loftiest genius can devise most perfect and most lovely. 
Thus, we say that a gorgeous public function, in which every art and 
science unite to complete a magnificence such as will captivate the 
most cold and satisfy the most severe, is but the natural expression of 
the love of the Christian's heart towards Him who gave him all that 
he enjoys. 

Again, it is a Catholic maxim, that outward circumstances, whether 
ceremonies, music, forms of prayer, or postures of the body of the 
worshiper himself, act upon the mind within, assist it in its endeavors 
to realize the truths of religion, and form, in a subordinate sense, chan- 
nels by which the Spirit of God excites, controls, and strengthens our 
purely spiritual devotions. All these principles I have found to be re- 
cognized by Catholics of every class, as elementary facts in human 
nature, and not to be rejected without a violation of the laws of com- 
mon sense and philosophy, as well as of those of ecclesiastical re- 
gulation and devout feeling. So far, therefore, it is eminently true 
that Catholics think more of the externals of religion than most Pro- 
testants. 

But at the same time, judging both from myself and from what I 
see in other Catholics of every class, I perceive that Catholic devotion 
stands far less in need of these aids than does Protestant devotion ; and 
that when circumstances compel us, we can dispense with everything 
that is outward and visible in our worship of God, with a facility 
and even a joy, which, to those who know us not, will appear incre- 
dible. And not only so ; but even when we are in possession of every 
delightful and appropriate accessory to our devotions, we at all times 
think of them, and rest upon them, and put ourselves out of the way 



55 

in order to enjoy them, so marvellously little, that at times the Catholic 
almost seems utterly regardless of the common propriety of outward 
appearances. As far as my experience teaches, persons who have 
been brought up Catholics can hardly understand the importance which 
some Protestants attach to the outward forms of devotion ; they as 
naturally dispense with them, when called to do so, as they employ 
them when occasion offers. They do not refute the common charge 
of formalism which Protestants bring against them, for the best of all 
reasons, that they are hardly conscious that it is brought. That reli- 
gion should consist in outward forms, in words, in postures, in rubrics, 
in ceremonies, or even in fasting and bodily mortification, seems to the 
Catholic such a palpable absurdity, that he cannot conceive how deeply 
the Protestant world is convinced that Catholicism is a religion of cere- 
monies and external acts. 

Let the question be put to any average Catholic; let him be asked 
whether he cannot pray without an image or picture before him, with- 
out crossing himself or touching holy water, without being in a par- 
ticular posture, without using one particular form of words, without 
being in one particular place; let him be asked whether he thinks 
prayer consists in saying words, and not in the direction of the thoughts 
and heart to God; and he will laugh at the person who supposes him 
capable of such childish and anti-Christian folly, and hardly believe 
that any man who has the slightest idea of what religion is, should 
suppose him guilty of such a perversion of the first elements of Chris- 
tianity. I can most conscientiously declare, for my own part, that I 
have found the influence of the Catholic system to be such, that while 
it enables me to spiritualize, so to say, every outward religious form, 
and to infuse a living meaning alike into the most simple and the most 
elaborate ceremony ; at the same time it has conferred on me a practical 
power of being independent of all external aids to devotion, when cir- 
cumstances make them virtually impossible. So far from finding splen- 
dor, good taste, refinement, architecture, painting, music, more neces- 
sary than before to keep alive the spirit of devotion, and to act as wings 
on which the soul may mount up from earth to heaven, I have found 
them far less necessary, or rather, in honest truth not necessary in the 
slightest degree. 

And what I personally experience, that I see in every one else around 
me. I see persons who, while they were members of the Anglican 
communion, were the loudest in insisting upon the immense importance 
of splendor and ceremonial in the public worship of God, and who 
were distracted and tormented in their prayers by every casual viola- 



56 

tion of strict propriety, rapidly passing from this slavish condition to a 
spiritual power and freedom of soul, and enabled to rule instead of 
being in bondage to outward circumstances. Observers, who are 
strange to the inward life of Catholic devotion, would be amazed at the 
extraordinary facility which Catholics possess in praying at all times 
and in all places, in the midst of noise, and bustle, and movement, 
which would be utterly fatal to all collected thought in themselves. I 
would that they who think we are formalists, and abject devotees to 
that splendor with which we delight to surround our great religious 
celebrations, would accustom themselves to visit Catholic churches and 
chapels at various hours in the day, or to associate with Catholics in 
familiar domestic life. I can assure them, that they would perceive that 
the soul of the devout Catholic repeatedly communes with her Lord in 
heaven, with a directness, an energy, and a warmth of feeling, which 
makes her independent of everything visible and audible around her, 
and enables her to pray amid scenes where the best of Protestants 
would find prayer a simple impossibility. In no one thing is the con- 
trast between a Catholic and a Protestant church more striking than 
in this, that the former is a place, in which persons are seen to pray 
naturally, at all hours and in all circumstances ; during the regular 
public service, before it begins, after it is over, in union with the 
officiating priest, or independently of him, in a crowd, in solitude, 
while the turmoil of workmen fills the air, while a choir or an organist 
is practicing music, while Catholic strangers are reverently walking 
about, while Protestant strangers are staring and lounging, on a Sun- 
day or a week-day, for ten minutes in the midst of a walk, at a few 
hurried intervals while the necessities of business cause incessant 
interruptions, with a book or without a book, standing, sitting or kneel- 
ing, as bodily strength or accommodation may permit ; — in every pos- 
sible circumstance, and under every conceivable disadvantage, a Catholic 
church displays men, women, and children at prayer, absorbed in their 
own thoughts, insensible of all that passes around them, and filled with 
the consciousness that they are in the presence of their God. 

Especially is this power of approaching Almighty God at all times 
in heartfelt prayer, to be noticed in churches where the Blessed Sacra- 
ment is reserved in the tabernacle upon the altar. The instantaneous 
and spontaneous homage which the soul of every Catholic pays to the 
Presence of his Lord in the consecrated species, must indeed be per- 
sonally experienced in order to be adequately comprehended. It is a 
thing which cannot be explained in words. How it unites awe with 
love, fear with tenderness, reverence with joy, and obedience with 



57 

childlike freedom ; how it naturally silences the voice to a whisper, 
bids the foot tread gently upon the floor, bends the knee in adoration, 
and fills the whole soul with a sense of the greatness of God, the 
blessedness of redemption, and the hatefulness of sin ; — all this must 
be felt to be understood. No tongue can describe it, as nothing but 
the indwelling grace of the Holy Ghost can confer it. All that can be 
done is to remind the non-Catholic inquirer, that we have a doctrine 
which teaches us, that Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, resides 
day and night upon our altars, imprisoned, as it were, through the ex- 
cess of his love, and waiting every moment that passes to shed his 
boundless blessings upon every heart that comes to visit Him in peni- 
tence and affection; and to assure him that this is no empty, unprac- 
tical dogma, but a belief which is beyond expression dear to our souls, 
and which exerts an incessant practical influence in those places where 
He thus resides, to which every sincere Catholic mind delights to 
yield. 

Here, too, I must add a word respecting that singular notion which 
Protestants entertain with regard to the supposed Catholic rule, that we 
should always pray in a set form of words, learnt by heart, or read from 
a book. That Catholics discountenance extempore public prayer in an 
assemblage of persons, except in peculiar circumstances, is most true ; 
and the reasons why they do so will commend themselves to every 
person of common sense. But that the Catholic is taught to pray only 
in fixed forms of words in his closet, or even while he is joining in the 
public services of the Church, is as unmixed an untruth as ever pro- 
ceeded from anti-Catholic prejudice. Everything I ever read in a 
Catholic book, everything I have ever heard since I became a Catholic, 
unites in teaching a doctrine the very reverse of this common accusa- 
tion. I never met with a spiritual treatise which did not expressly 
declare, that in our secret devotions it is of the utmost importance 
never to check the free aspirations of the soul to God by any rigid 
conformity to the forms we ordinarily use; that the best prayers are 
those which, we may trust, are inspired by the Holy Ghost at the time 
we pray ; and that we should have habitual recourse to set forms only 
because the human mind is weak and ignorant, and cannot at all times 
express itself fitly in its own phrases, or recollect all the details in 
which it is right that it should pray, and praise, and adore, and inter- 
cede. Written prayers are to the Catholic a kind of skeleton for his 
devotions. He is taught to clothe them, precisely as his own personal 
love and necessities require, with those petitions, those phrases, those 
prolonged meditations, or those arrowlike ejaculations, which are the 



58 

natural fruit of his own personal feelings and thoughts. The greatest 
masters in the spiritual life, while they advise an amount of prayer and 
meditation during the day, which few Protestants would not think 
outrageously excessive, at the same time furnish written prayers of the 
briefest possible character, rather subjects for prayer than actual devo- 
tions, and modeled upon the principle on which we may humbly con- 
ceive that our blessed Lord himself modeled the prayer He taught us, 
when He said, " Thus, therefore, shall you pray." 

In immediate connection with the power of faith in the realities of the 
invisible universe, it will be natural to state the influence of Catho- 
licism upon the general relationship of the heart towards its God and 
Savior. And if I have found that the popular ideas of this influence 
are deficient in the points to which I have already alluded, still more 
radically false have I found them in all that pertains to the feelings of 
man towards his Maker. The common opinion of Catholicism is, that 
its natural result is a sense of mingled slavery and presumptuousness ; 
that it obscures the essentially ^/za/ relation of man redeemed, to his 
almighty Lord ; that it makes religion consist in a sort of bargain be- 
tween God and man, in which the former sells and the latter purchases 
heaven by his good works ; that it substitutes superstitious dread for 
reverent fear, and self-trust for self-sacrifice and humility ; that it 
almost obliterates the perfectly gratuitous character of the gift of re- 
demption ; and that the very last thing which would enter into a 
Catholic's mind is to teach and believe that love for God is all in all. 

In replying to this idea, I first meet it simply with a direct negative 
in every one of its parts. I speak the opinion of myself and of every 
Catholic of whose opinions I have any knowledge, when I assert that 
the feeling of bondage, or slavery, does not enter for a moment into 
our habitual frame of mind. Strict and absolute as are our ideas of 
duty, of the necessity of penance, of the value of suffering, they do not 
in the slightest conceivable measure interfere with that sense of our 
filial relation to our almighty and all-holy God, which lies at the very 
foundation of our spiritual life, and which pervades our every thought, 
word, and deed. If there is any one result of reconciliation to the 
Church which the convert finds more striking than another, it is the sense 
of reconciliation to God through the merits of Jesus Christ, and of the 
transcending greatness of his love and mercy towards us. We know 
not what it is to be of raid of Almighty God; we see nothing in Him 
which is not sweet, attractive, touching, and inviting, even to the most 
abominable of sinners. We fear Him, as every creature must fear 
its Creator ; but we are unconscious of any feeling of being driven from 



59 

Him, or of having duties imposed upon us which it is impossible to 
perform. Our confidence in Him is boundless ; whatever our sins, 
whatever the enduring obstinacy of our own evil nature, we know that 
we only add to our guilt by keeping away from him and by doubting his 
mercy. We have but one cause of dread, the knowledge of the deceit- 
fulness of our own minds, and of the possibility that, after all our 
prayers and our efforts, we may still be cheating ourselves, and imagin- 
ing that we love God, while in reality our hearts are estranged from 
Him. Peace is so emphatically our possession, that, contrasted with 
what we perceive to be the general condition of conscientious Protest- 
ants, I do not hesitate to say that no man knows what peace with God 
really is until he enters the fold of the Catholic Church. 

The doctrine of the absolute necessity of doing penance for our sins, 
though forgiven — of making satisfaction for them, after their eternal 
punishment has been done away with through the atonement of Jesus 
Christ, either by sufferings in this life or in purgatory, is supposed to 
be incompatible with that deep sense of joy and happiness which the 
Bible tells us that Christians reap from their sense of reconciliation to 
God. And so it will naturally seem to those whose minds are not im- 
pressed as ours are with a sense of the awful nature of sin, and of the 
strictness of the divine law; but nevertheless, theorize as people may, 
the knowledge that all sin, though forgiven, demands suffering as a 
satisfaction for its guilt, either here or hereafter, does not interfere with 
the fulness of the Catholic's gladness and peace, or for one moment 
cloud that sunshine which the hope of seeing God in heaven produces 
in his soul. For myself, the longer I experience, and the more calmly 
I examine into, the effects of the doctrine of satisfaction upon the peace- 
ful serenity of the Christian heart, the more clearly do I perceive, the 
more thankfully do I acquiesce in, its perfect harmony with the bound- 
lessness of that pardon which the death of Christ has procured for all 
men. And all Catholics say the same thing. Ask them, if you doubt 
my words, whether the knowledge that purgatory awaits them if they 
die with one stain of sin remaining on their souls, embitters a single 
hour of their lives, or calls forth a single murmur against the justice of 
God who demands such a satisfaction at their hands ? 

Again: this same doctrine of the value and necessity of suffering, as 
an expiation of sins which are yet at the same time forgiven, is sup- 
posed to foster a notion that man can atone for his own guilt towards 
God, and to be derogatory to the perfectness of that sacrifice which our 
blessed Lord offered up for us on the cross. As I am not engaged in 
an exposition of what Catholic doctrines really are, but in relating their 



60 

practical influences upon the mind, I shall not stay to show that they 
who bring this accusation are entirely ignorant of the true nature of the 
doctrines they condemn, but rather call the reader's attention to the 
matter of fact, which he may ascertain for himself by making the 
inquiry of any Catholic who attends to his religious duties. For my- 
self, I can most truly allege, that whatever might have been my sus- 
picions of the tendency of the doctrine of satisfaction while I was still 
a Protestant, no one thought has ever crossed my mind since I was a 
Catholic which tended to disparage the infinite value of the atonement 
of the eternal Son of God : nor has it ever entered my thoughts to 
esteem the sufferings of any creature whatsoever as of the slightest 
value, except that which they received from the sufferings and merits 
of Jesus Christ. Candid Protestants suppose that an intelligent and 
religious Catholic preserves himself from falling into all kinds of abo- 
minations by a perpetual balancing of one doctrine against another, by 
watching the effect of each separate dogma upon himself, and prevent- 
ing it from producing that pernicious result which they suppose that it 
would naturally work if left to itself. Thus, they conceive that the 
doctrines of human satisfaction and of the perfectness of the atonement 
of our blessed Lord are naturally antagonistic to one another, and that 
Catholics are in perpetual peril of sliding into a state of mind which 
dishonors the mediation of Christ, and makes man his own redeemer. 
The practical result, on the contrary, shows that this fear is a mere 
illusion. Every Catholic who knows what the doctrines of his Church 
really are, is literally unconscious of any such antagonism in his own 
bosom. I can most solemnly protest, that so far from having found my 
sense of the infinite value of the atonement of Christ encroached upon 
by my belief in the doctrines of satisfaction and penance, I find that 
the very reverse is the case. Since I have become a Catholic, my con- 
ceptions of the boundlessness of the merits of our blessed Lord, and 
the utter nothingness of all man's merit, except as communicated from 
the merits of the sacrifice of the cross, have wonderfully enlarged and 
deepened, and become unceasingly habitual, and have entered into my 
every thought, work, and feeling, to such an extent, that the honor I 
formerly paid to the one atonement of the Eternal Son was compara- 
tively a divided homage and an ignorant faith. And I am not speaking 
mere rhetorical words, or indulging in controversial exaggeration, when 
I add that, from all I have learnt and observed since I became a Ca- 
tholic, I am convinced that the only persons in this country who truly 
realize the infinite value of the sacrifice of Calvary, and who depend 
upon that sacrifice alone for everything that they possess and every 



61 

thing they hope for, are the children of the Catholic Church. The 
incredulous Evangelical or Anglican may smile, and count this a mere 
effusion of angry declamation; but, on the word of an honest man, I 
assure them, that could they experience for one single day what are the 
habitual thoughts, feelings, prayers, and acts of a conscientious Catholic, 
they would admit the truth of what I say, when I repeat, that the in- 
effable perfections and meritoriousness of the death of Jesus Christ, 
and the complete and never-ceasing natural helplessness and worthless- 
ness of man's works, are comprehended and accepted in the Roman 
Catholic Church alone. 

Such also is unquestionably the practical influence upon the mind of 
the Catholic doctrines of free-will and the merit of good works. It is 
the doctrine of the Church that, though we can do nothing whatsoever 
that is good, not even think a good thought, without the aid of the Holy 
Spirit of God, yet that, in order to be saved, our will, when set free by 
grace, must co-operate with the Divine influence, or we shall continue 
lost in sin. And further, she teaches that it pleases Almighty God, in 
his infinite condescension, to treat our good deeds as meritorious, and 
to reward them with eternal life, although they are from first to last 
the work of his Spirit within us, and although, even if we were to 
become literally sinless, we should be for ever and ever unprofitable 
servants. And it is commonly supposed that, even granting these 
doctrines to be true, yet their tendency is to conceal the nothingness of 
man's deeds, to obscure the glory of the atonement offered for our sins, 
to make us forget the positive sinfulness and infirmities which cling to 
our holiest thoughts and actions, and to foster a spirit of audacious pride, 
which makes us think that we are purchasing salvation with a certain 
payment of our own, and that we do not from first to last owe all to 
the mercy and goodness of God. The most candid Protestants are 
suspicious of the urgency with which these things are inculcated by 
Catholic preachers and writers; they are conscious that in their own 
minds there is an incessant tendency to self-trust, to forgetfulness of 
their own nothingness and helplessness, and to a distrust of the unlimited 
promises of spiritual aid which God makes to those who believe. The 
purely gratuitous character of our salvation, from first to last, is a truth 
which, though they know to be true, they feel the greatest difficulty in 
realizing. They imagine that the only way by which a Christian can 
be preserved from this idolatry of self is by a perpetual balancing of 
one doctrine with another — by setting the doctrine of the atonement 
against the doctrine of human merit, and the omnipotence of God 
against the feebleness of man. When, then, they see Catholics never 



62 

dreaming of this perpetual qualification of truths, but insisting upon 
each separate doctrine as if it alone were the whole truth of the Gospel, 
they are staggered and confounded; they cannot conceive how such 
things can be done, without baneful mischief to the religious character, 
without fostering the most unchristian sentiments in those who are 
guided by such rash and careless teaching. 

Again, a similar pernicious consequence is attributed to our belief in 
the efficacy of the intercession of the Saints. I am speaking, of course, 
of what is supposed by Protestants of ordinary sense and charity, who 
are aware that the Catholic does not positively worship the blessed 
Virgin Mary as God, and that we depend on her prayers, and on those 
of other saints, simply as prayers offered up for us by our fellow- 
creatures now in glory. As to those who regard Catholics as neces- 
sarily idolaters, polytheists, or such like, I have nothing now to say to 
them. Their fanatical blindness must be cured, if cured at all, by other 
means besides calm and rational argument. But it is notorious that, 
from the most ultra-Romanizing Anglican down to the mere shrewd 
observer in the non-religious world, it is received as an undoubted axiom, 
that the Roman doctrine and practice with respect to the blessed Virgin 
and the Saints is naturally antagonistic to the doctrine that there is but 
one essentially meritorious Mediator between God and man. Our very 
best friends are persuaded that, in order to avoid idolatry, we are forced 
to be ever explaining away some portion of our creed ; that Catholic 
devotion sways, as it were, from side to side, now verging on a neglect 
of the Saints and doubts of the advantages to be derived by praying to 
them, now in imminent peril of dishonoring Almighty God and of de- 
pending upon creatures for salvation. It is supposed to be impossible 
that we should hold any one dogma of our Church in its perfect ful- 
ness, or carry it out uncompromisingly to its legitimate consequences, 
without violating some other article of our faith. In a word, Catholic 
practice, when good and religious, is believed to be a system of checks 
and counterbalancing, like the British constitution, in which king, lords, 
and commons have each a separate interest and separate tendencies, and 
act together (to use a mathematical phrase) by a composition of opposing 
forces, just as the earth is kept in its place in the solar system. 

This, then, is that striking and universally true fact which I have 
learnt since I became a Catholic, — that while all other religions are kept 
from falling into the chaos of infidelity or the madness of fanaticism by 
such a balancing of their elements as I have described, the nature of 
Catholic truth is precisely and in every respect the reverse. The result 
of my personal experience, and of what I see all around me, is a con- 



63 

viction, which every day gains fresh strength, that the Catholic system 
of doctrine is the only self-consistent scheme of faith in existence. 
Day by day, and hour by hour, as we practice its rules and act upon 
its dogmas, the more amazing and divine does its wondrous harmony 
appear. Throughout its vast range we can detect no one solitary doc- 
trine or custom which may not be carried out fearlessly, energetically, 
and incessantly to its utmost consequences, and leave no trace of injury 
to the perfection of the spiritual life. They have but to be correctly 
understood, and there is no shadow of danger of their leading us astray. 
So far from interfering with one another, or balancing one another, they 
are rather each a part of all the rest, a consequence of the rest, an 
eternally logical deduction from the rest. You cannot touch one of 
them with irreverent hand, without wounding the susceptibility of the 
remainder. You cannot doubt the truth of one of them without a 
measure of unbelief in every one that remains. They act together 
upon the soul, as friends, not as rivals; their interests, so to say, are 
one, not many ; not only do they not serve to antagonize one another, 
but they cannot do so; the more vividly the soul realizes one of them, 
the more brilliant is the light which beams out upon her from all the 
rest; the more deeply and fervently she meditates upon each separate 
truth, the more profound is her perception of the truth and glory of the 
whole system, the more keen her appreciation of its descent from the 
eternal throne of God. 

No man, I repeat, can be a consistent Catholic, and not learn to smile 
at the simplicity which accounts the honor we pay to the Saints to be 
a derogation from the incommunicable majesty of God. No man can 
love and honor Mary the mother of Jesus as we love and honor her, 
without feeling that the more he loves her the more he loves her Son 
and her Lord, and the more he honors her, the more overwhelming is 
his sense of the distance which separates her from Him whom she bore. 
The whole mass of objection, censure, pity, and fear, which the Pro- 
testant feels for the Catholic, vanishes like a morning mist when the 
soul once finds herself within that communion whose creed presents 
such an incomprehensible enigma to those who are without her pale. 
He perceives at once that he has come into a state in which the apostle's 
words are fulfilled in a sense of which before he little conceived, 
" Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Such, with literal 
exactness, can I declare to be the influence of the Catholic system on 
those who are within it. I am now unconscious of the very existence 
of any of those chains which in former days hampered and bound 
down my intelligence and moral nature. I find myself in the midst 



64 

of a system which is eminently what I should expect from a revelation 
of the eternal nature of God; a system, not of servitude hut of free- 
dom, in which I am not called to set up one article of my creed against 
another, to be ever fretting myself with anxiety lest — oh, monstrous 
supposition! — truth lead me into error; or to exercise my private 
critical faculties upon the general spirit which, from its foundation, has 
animated and ruled the communion to which I belong, in order that I 
may be wiser than my fathers, and discover doctrines as scientific 
people discover facts in electricity or geology. I find that all I have to 
do is to throw myself, with all my powers, into the creed and practical 
system which is around me — without hesitation, without worldly cau- 
tion, without nervous fear lest it fail me or lead me astray ; and the 
more vigorously, deeply, and humbly I do this, the more does its sur- 
passing beauty, its perfect unity amid boundless variety* its harmonious 
action, and its logical self-consistency, strike upon my mind, and satisfy 
every aspiration of which my soul is capable. 

And the reader may assure himself that in saying this I am but put- 
ting into shape and words, the consciousness of tens of thousands of 
his fellow-countrymen. I challenge him to appeal to any tolerably in- 
telligent person among those who have left Protestantism for Catholic- 
ism, who may be intellectually capable of explaining the phenomena 
of his own mind, and to ask him whether I have in the slightest degree 
overstated the fact when I say, that the various doctrines of Catholicism 
cohere by mutual relationship, and not by mutual antagonism — that 
they are one, as the demonstrations of geometry and algebra are one, 
because each depends for its very existence upon the rest; and not as 
a system of rules devised for a secular institution or society, by balanc- 
ing one another, and by correcting one another, under the severe super- 
vision of some external authority, which has power to enforce submission 
to every rule, and to see that no one regulation is stretched beyond the 
intentions of its framers. The inherent unity of Catholic doctrine is 
as complete as that visible ecclesiastical unity which it enjoins on all 
who obey it. 

After touching on one or two more features in Catholic belief and 
opinion which demand a brief notice, I shall now bring my remarks to 
a conclusion. The first refers to that excessive. credulity and super- 
stitious delight in the marvelous which the unbelieving or philosophic 
observer imputes to members of the Roman Church. It is imagined 
that generally throughout the Catholic Church there exists an absurd 
disposition to believe that every little event which is in the slightest 
degree removed from the run of every-day occurrence is miraculous; 



65 

while among the more educated classes, however devout they may be, 
there is a practical disbelief in many things which authority counte- 
nances in the vulgar. The popular Catholic feeling is supposed to be 
groveling, debased, and superstitious to a frightful extent. What, then, 
is the fact, so far as I have been myself able to judge? 

In the first place, it cannot be denied that, among Catholics, as among 
all mankind, there exists an immense variety of personal character, and 
that in such a matter as credulity or incredulity, this variety in natural 
penetration displays itself with especial force. Consequently, we meet 
with Catholics who, the moment any event is reported to be miraculous, 
instantly believe that it is so ; and we meet with others who are mor- 
bidly sensitive to the peril of false belief, and refuse to be convinced 
that anything supernatural has taken place, even upon the most unde- 
niable testimony. But that the former class are confined to the poor 
and uneducated, and the latter to the rich and cultivated, I absolutely 
deny, as I equally deny, that the general skepticism in the supernatural, 
which the world attributes to educated Catholics, has the slightest founda- 
tion in fact. Doubtless, men who are Catholics only in name — who 
were brought up Catholics, but by their lives plainly show that they 
have no religion at all — delight to display their superiority to what they 
call the vulgar follies of priests and pious fools. We have Catholics 
in every rank, from the highest to the very lowest, who are never so 
pleased as when they can mock at the silliness of a devout believer in 
the powers of relics, in the gift of healing, or the reality of demoniacal 
possession. In the peerage and the poorhouse alike, these miserable 
self-convicting scoffers are to be found ; but they are invariably distin- 
guished, not by the superior keenness of their intellects, for they never 
rise beyond second-rate or third-rate abilities, but by the laxity of their 
lives, the infrequency of their prayers, and the unwillingness, with 
which they yield to the rules of the Church even that minimum of 
obedience, which she exacts under penalty of virtual excommunication. 

Among good Catholics, of whatever rank, I have found but one ge- 
neral belief prevailing respecting things professing to be supernatural. 
All hold the same principle ; all believe that miracles are wrought in 
the present day, sometimes rarely, sometimes frequently ; all believe 
that special graces are sometimes connected with material objects, such 
as pictures, images, relics, and various devotions. The only variations 
I have seen have arisen from the difference in different persons' ideas 
as to what constitutes a sufficient proof that supernatural interference 
has taken place in any one given instance. Those, who know how 
easily men are deceived in all things, and what great discrimination is 
5 



66 

necessary to separate the miraculous from the merely marvelous, are 
naturally most cautious in giving credence to the reports of miraculous 
events which they hear from time to time ; but then they are equally 
cautious in denying, without investigation, that anything supernatural 
has really occurred. Others, deeply impressed with the reality of that 
Divine presence in the Church, which can at any moment burst through 
the ordinary laws of nature, and little experienced in the follies, the 
ignorance, and the hastiness even of good men, are prone to give an 
instant assent to every extraordinary story they hear, and, through fear 
of doing wrong in denying a miracle where it really exists, rush head- 
long into the equally irrational extreme, of believing a miracle to have 
certainly occurred, whenever it is barely possible for such a thing to 
have taken place. Still, the principle is the same in all alike; all re- 
pudiate with horror the feeling which Protestants attribute to educated 
Catholics. The only distinction, that exists among them, is in the de- 
cree of evidence they require before giving their absolute assent. 

That the clergy, and especially the highest authorities in the Church, 
are in the habit of encouraging an irrational and superstitious belief in 
the supernatural, so far as my experience goes, is utterly untrue. I 
have no hesitation in saying, that the whole spirit of Catholic Church 
authority is to throw the greatest doubt upon every professed miracle 
or marvel, and to refuse approval to any such reports, until searching 
inquiry has been made. Not that this is done with a feeling of unbe- 
lief, but from a sentiment of caution and prudence, from a knowledge 
ihat the safe side is to leave every private individual to entertain any 
opinions he chooses, and to lend the sanction of judicial authority only 
to extraordinary and undeniably proved cases. 

I have also found that the importance, which is attributed to miracles 
among Catholics, is very different from what would popularly be sup- 
posed to be their feelings on the subject. They are as far as possible 
from feeling that nervous, excited interest in every miraculous story 
which is characteristic of a superstitious disposition. They take a 
miracle, when even proved beyond a doubt — to use a common phrase — 
wonderfully coolly. They see nothing extraordinary or startling in it. 
They think it quite natural, that such things should occasionally occur, 
and can see nothing astonishing in our blessed Lord's fulfilling his own 
promises. They feel a deep interest in them, just as astronomers are 
especially interested in the discovery or the return of a comet; they are 
edified, and their devotions are powerfully quickened. They are not 
morbidly anxious to talk about them, to boast of them, to relate them 
to Protestants, to see the persons who have been their subjects. They 



67 

view them as an integral portion of the vital phenomena of the Church ; 
as consolations to the faithful, rather than as arguments to unbelievers ; 
and to be received with thankfulness, rather than sought after with 
eagerness. I have never myself had the opportunity of witnessing a 
miracle, but I have received accounts of them from persons, with whom 
I am intimately acquainted, and who were themselves either eye-wit- 
nesses or actually the subjects of the supernatural influence. Three 
such instances I can at once call to mind, exclusive of those mysterious 
manifestations of divine power and love, the Addolorata and the Es~ 
tatica of the Tyrol, whose circumstances have been more than once 
made public in accounts, for whose rigid accuracy I have had the testi- 
mony of several of my own friends. What these were the reader may 
be interested in learning. 

One of these three was the instantaneous cure of the divided tendons 
of a woman's wrist, by the application of a relic, and that by a process 
which continued the miracle through the remainder of her life; for the 
division between the tendons was not healed, while she regained the 
perfect use of her hand and arm, the cut to the bone remaining visible 
to the eye. This has been related to me by two gentlemen who had 
seen the person repeatedly, and examined her wrist. The medical 
man, who had attended her, though an infidel, had admitted that the 
cure was supernatural. 

Another was related to me by the person, who was himself healed, 
and who is now an officer in the Queen's army, and of whose perfect 
truthfulness I do not entertain the shadow of a doubt. A wound in the 
foot, from injudicious treatment, had confined him to his bed for ten 
weeks, and brought him to the point of death, through exhaustion and 
spasms of the whole body. He was given up by his medical attendants ; 
and he told me, that the foot was so swelled, that he could not himself 
even see the toes. A certain relic, after the usual prayers, was applied 
to the wounded part ; the swelling instantly subsided, and in a quarter 
of an hour he was dressed and out of doors, and in the enjoyment of 
perfect health and strength. All this he detailed to me himself, relating 
it with the same natural simplicity as if he had been relating a cure by 
common medical means. 

The third was the appearance of a woman after death to her husband, 
informing him, that she was in purgatory, and desiring him to do certain 
things, which I need not detail. Among others, he was to communi- 
cate what she told him to my friend, who informed me of the par- 
ticulars ; and this communication comprised an account of what he 
(the friend of whom I am speaking) had done since her death, and 



68 

which by no possibility could have been known to any other living 
being upon earth. 

These three cases I briefly mention, not with a view to prove them T 
though I could do this to any person, who wished to make the inquiry, 
but as facts connected with my experience of Catholicism, and as illus- 
trations of the kind of belief in the supernatural, which still prevails 
among educated Catholics, both of the clergy and the laity. 

Lastly, it will be expected, that I should relate the practical influence 
of the Catholic doctrine of the exclusive salvation of members of the 
Church of Rome. That doctrine, it is known to all tolerably well- 
informed persons, by no means implies, that none but Catholics actually 
are saved, but that none are saved, who have had the means of com- 
prehending the claims of the Catholic Church upon their obedience. 
Well or ill understood, however, it is certain, that no one dogma of 
Catholicism is more hateful to Protestants than this. It galls them, 
wounds them, and at times stimulates them to an almost frantic hatred 
of the Catholic Church ; as if our opinion made the slightest difference 
10 them and their real state before God. And even the most reason- 
able are painfully anxious to know what we do feel respecting our Pro- 
testant fellow-creatures, and what change takes place in the mind of a 
convert towards those, whose views he formerly shared. 

It cannot be concealed, then, that the instantaneous result of a sub- 
mission to the Church, is an entire change of sentiment towards every 
possible denomination of Protestantism, and an alienation of spiritual 
feeling from those, with whom once we ardently sympathized. The 
moment I entered the Church, the Anglican Establishment became to 
me as nothing more than what a dream is to a waking man. A gulf — 
wide, deep, and impenetrable — separated my present from my past 
interests. What they most valued, I looked upon as a delusion ; their 
principles I accounted to be logical absurdities ; their hopes, baseless ; 
their strength, weakness ; their faith, mere fancy. Whatever might be 
my hope, that such and such persons among them were guiltless in the 
sight of God, because they really could not see the truth, I ceased to 
feel the slightest interest in their opinions, their system, their conduct, 
— except so far as it indicated a tendency to Catholicism, and created 
hopes, that they might do, as I had done. 

In other respects, the Christianity (so-called) of Protestant Europe, 
merely occupies a place in my interests in conjunction with its political 
systems, and all other human institutions. It is a subject for study, for 
interest, for knowledge, for history, for controversy, for pity, for indig- 
nation ; but my deep and real spiritual interests are as rigidly confined 



within the limits of the Catholic Church, as the island of Great Britain 
is girt in by the waves of the seas that surround her. 

But all this generates no feeling of hostility towards individual Pro- 
testants, and not the slightest disregard of their wishes or happiness. 
In all subjects in which religious principles, hopes, and fears do not 
enter, they are to me the same as before ; while my interest in their 
everlasting welfare, and the depth of my sorrow for their condition, be- 
come greater every day. As to their state as individuals in the sight 
of God, I know nothing, nor do I venture to speculate, except so far 
as to hope for the best. And such I find to be the ordinary feelings of 
Catholics towards Protestants. As for regarding Protestantism with 
respect, or treating the theories of Romanizing Anglicans as anything 
but the phantoms of a diseased imagination, Catholics never dream of it. 
But when they come to think or speak upon the probability, that any one 
single person is in a state of invincible ignorance, and therefore, per- 
haps accepted by God as a true Christian, they invariably abstain from 
any conclusion. They know, that God alone sees men's hearts, knows 
their difficulties, or can judge them with strict justice. Such I have 
found to be the universal sentiment of Catholics, call it tolerance, or 
call it intolerance, as we may. Undoubtedly, there are wide differences 
amongst us as to the amount of real piety, which probably does exist 
among Protestants. Some Catholics, both clergy and laity, believe 
that very many Protestants, who have no means of learning the truth, 
are so sincerely devoted to God, and love Him with so pure a love, 
that they will be saved. Others think that almost all the tokens of 
piety we see in the Protestant world, are mere outward appearances, 
and that the whole heart of the Protestant is rarely, if ever, given up to 
the service of God. In such a subject, every man naturally has his 
own opinion, and every man judges very much by the kind of persons 
he has himself met with in the Protestant body. 

For myself, I hardly know how either to hope or fear for any one, 
even of those of whom I know the most. I see so much, that is unde- 
niably good, mixed up with symptoms, which seem to indicate radical 
mischief in the heart ; and with all my fervent anxieties to believe, that 
great is the number of Protestants who will be accepted at the last, I 
can detect such rare signs of the love of God (without which none can 
be saved), that my thoughts respecting seemingly-religious Protestants, 
oscillate between hope and fear, between a conviction that they cannot 
know the truth, and a fearful perception, that they ivill not know it. 
A familiarity, too, with true Catholic piety renders the eye far more 
keen, than before in detecting real religion from its counterfeits. The 



70 

mind, thai has come to know the genuine Christian character as it is 
manifested in the Church, perceives a falling short in the very elements 
of the spiritual life in those, whom it was once wont to look up to with 
reverence and admiration. Not that we come to look upon our Pro- 
testant friends as hypocrites and deceivers. Far from it. We give 
them as much credit as ever for being what they seem. But we see 
that they deceive themselves ; that they are living in the midst of a 
spiritual atmosphere, which blinds their eyes to their shortcomings, and 
induces them to mistake morality, amiableness, and a sacrifice of half 
the heart to God, for that entire consecration of the whole man, without 
which all else is vain. We recognize a spirit of the most presumptuous 
private judgment, where formerly we saw only a deference to authority ; 
we see a trust in self, in bodily austerities, in forms and words, and a 
forgetfulness, that all these are worthless without pure love, where be- 
fore we thought, that this outward religion was the token of a genuine 
religion of the heart within ; we see a disposition to make a compromise 
with the world, to adopt its maxims, to shrink from consequences, to 
close the eyes to truth, to oppose the true Church at all risks and by 
unscrupulous means, to overlook facts, to pervert reasonings, and to 
cling to the temporal advantages of Protestantism, in minds which in 
other days we accounted sincere, truth-seeking, and almost saintly in 
their devotion. And therefore, fervent as is our desire to believe all 
that is kind and charitable of those we have left behind, we cannot 
blind ourselves to the manifest tokens, that their ordinary spirit is not 
the spirit of Christ ; and that, whatever be the unknown exceptions, 
he, who would find the true spiritual life of the follower of Jesus Christ, 
must seek it in the Catholic Church alone. 

Such, then, is my experience of the effects of this mysterious and 
dreaded faith ; and such the facts which lie open to the sight of every 
careful observer. I came, forced by my convictions, and almost against 
my will, into this mighty community, whose embrace I had all my life 
dreaded as something paralyzing, enslaving, and torturing. No sooner, 
however, could I look around me, and mark what presented itself to my 
eyes, than I saw, that I was in a world, where all was as satisfying as 
it was new. For the first time, I met with a body of men and women, 
who could talk and act as Christians, without cant, without restraint, 
without formality, without hypocrisy. After years and years of disap- 
pointment, in which, the more deeply I saw into the hearts and lives 
of Protestants of every class, the more clearly I perceived that the 
religion they professed had not become their second nature, but was 



71 

a thing put on, which did not fit them, which confined their move» 
ments, and gave them an outward look, while it was not wrought into 
■ the depths of their being, — after years and years of this disappointment, 
in which the contrast between the Bible, which they praised, and the 
spirit of their own lives, and the doctrines they preached, struck me 
more bitterly each succeeding day, — at length, I found myself in the 
midst of a race, with whom Christianity was not a rule, but a principle; 
not a restraint, but a second nature; not a bondage, but a freedom ; in 
which it had precisely that effect, which it claims to produce upon man ; 
in which, not a few hours, or an occasional day, was set apart for re- 
ligion, but in which life was religious ; in which men spoke at all 
hours, and in all occupations, of religious things, naturally, as men 
speak of secular things, in which they are deeply interested ; in which 
religious thoughts and short prayers were found not incompatible with 
the necessary duties and pleasures which fill up the round of existence; 
and in which, the more deeply I was enabled to penetrate below the 
surface, the more genuine was the goodness I found, and the more 
inexhaustible I perceived to be those treasures of grace, which divine 
goodness places at the disposal (so to say) of every soul that seeks 
them within this favored communion. 

And now, when so long a period has elapsed since my first sub- 
mission to the Church, that everything like a sense of novelty has long 
passed away, and I have tested experimentally the value of all that she 
has to offer: now that I can employ her means of grace, and take a 
part in the working of her system, with all that ease and readiness of 
action, which long practice alone can bestow ; the more profound is my 
sense of her divine origin, of the divine power, which resides in her, 
and of the boundless variety and perfection of the blessings she has 
to bestow. The more I know her, the more complete do I perceive 
to be her correspondence to what she professes to be. She is exactly 
what the one Church of Christ is proclaimed to be in Scripture, and 
nothing less, and nothing more. She makes her children what she 
promises, with a literal fulfilment of her words, but she has no indul- 
gence for the dreams of fanaticism, or for the theories of those, who 
would have the Church of Christ to be fashioned after their model, 
and not Christ's model. For those, who would really ascertain what 
her doctrines are, nothing is easier of comprehension, and nothing can 
more abundantly repay the study of a whole life. Her moral system, 
elaborate as it is, and adapted to almost every emergency, which the 
boldest imagination can conceive, is found in practice to be as simple 
and direct in its operation as the elementary laws of the physical sys- 



72 

tern of the universe. Wherever she is touched, grace flows forth ; 
wherever she is leant upon, she puts forth an arm to support those, 
who trust her; wherever she is tried in argument, she comes forth 
more gloriously unassailable, the more rigorously she is tested by 
proofs, and the more thoroughly she is known as to facts ; and wherever 
she is tried by personal experience, she displays her adaptation to all 
the wants, the aspirations, the sins, the infirmities, and the powers of 
the soul of man. 

Truly, can I say with the patriarch, " The Lord is in this place, and 
1 knew it not. This is no other but the house of God, and the gate 
of heaven." The Catholic Church can be nothing less than the 
spiritual body of Jesus Christ. Nothing less, than that adorable Pre- 
sence, before which the angels veil their faces, can make her what she is, 
to those, who are within her fold. Argument is needed no longer. 
The scoffings of the infidel, the objections of the Protestant, the sneers 
of the man of the world, pass over their heads, as clouds over a moun- 
tain-peak, and leave them calm and undisturbed, with their feet resting 
upon the Rock of Ages. They know in whom they have believed. 
They have passed from speculation to action, and found that all is real, 
genuine, life-giving, and enduring. Such, with all my sense of the 
awful mysteriousness of the world, which is still invisible, of the falla- 
ciousness of human knowledge, and of the argumentative points, which 
controversy will ever urge against the claims of the Catholic Church, 
— such is the result of my experience of her aspect towards those, 
who repose upon her bosom, in order that they may gaze upon the 
lineaments of her countenance. As a child that rests upon its parent's 
breast, pressed to her heart with a tenderness that nothing less than a 
mother can bestow, and from that place of peace and security looks 
up into her eyes, and there reads the love which is its sweetest joy, so 
do I watch the aspect of her, who has clasped me in her arms, and sus- 
tains me, that I should not fall, and know, that she is indeed the mother 
of my soul. I know only one fear, the fear that my heart may be 
faithless to Him, who has bestowed on me this unspeakable blessing ; 
I know only one mystery, which the more I think upon it, the more 
incomprehensible does it appear — the mystery of that calling, which 
brought me into this home of rest, while millions and millions are 
still driven to and fro in the turbulent ocean of the world, without rud- 
der and without compass, without helmsman and without anchor, to 
drift before the gale upon the fatal shore. 

THE END. 



CAPES' EXPERIENCE 



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